How to Choose a Tech Career (It’s Simpler Than You Think!)

If you’ve been thinking about switching to tech, but have no prior experience, it may be hard to choose a career path. Which one will work for you? Personality-wise, what’s the best option? The  answer may be simpler than you think. Take our short quiz to discover your perfect tech profession. 

Your call: pick the best answer

Imagine you’re planning your summer vacation. As you come up with suggestions for places and budgets, your partner seems to disagree with the given options. They don’t feel enthusiastic about the upcoming trip, but you know it’s due to overworking and lack of rest. Which of the following moves sounds more like you?

1. You reminisce about the places you visited together and outline options your significant other enjoyed the most, presenting to them the destination with the most similarities.
2. You download the most attractive photos of the places and hotels you like and present them to your partner in a way that would inspire them.
3. You do extensive research on reviews online, calculate budgets, and develop a spreadsheet highlighting the pros and cons of the top three options that you can look into together.
4. You’re upset and you cancel the trip.

Answer one: data analyst

If you picked option one, you are most likely a natural data analyst. 

Data analysts are discoverers who believe in numbers and facts. What are the average ratings of the restaurants nearby? Have the reviews of that hotel you always wanted to visit improved? If you often find yourself analyzing information, checking facts, and asking questions “what” and “why”, it might be worth looking into the data analyst profession.

Data analysts are in high demand among businesses of any size. They help business owners to base decisions on real data and offer them data-driven insights. It all helps businesses to make decisions more effectively. 

Let’s imagine an owner of a small bakery with 30 regular clients. They want to know who these 30 people are: what they buy, what they like, their ages, and how much they usually spend at your shop so they can offer them better products and make higher profits. Answers to these questions help them identify where to find more potential clients like the regular ones. Here data analysts come to help out. They study customers’ behavior and demographics, find patterns, and turn them into valuable insights. When the bakery has 10,000 clients a day, the data analyst will know how to operate those numbers.

Potential positions for data analysts vary by role and responsibilities. An average annual salary of a data analyst in the U.S. is $70,292, according to Glassdoor, whereas a business analyst earns $82,141. An IT analyst is at a similar level, coming in at $83,695 per year. As you grow in the field, you can potentially find yourself in some of the top-earning business management departments, like growth analysts who can earn $99,550 per year.

Answer two: software engineer

If option two is your choice, you’re obviously keen on creating products (or websites) that call people to action. In this case, software engineering can be an enjoyable field for you. 

If you like creating and building things, anything from arts and crafts to construction work and even Lego models, you will probably enjoy dedicating time to troubleshooting and bug fixing. That is also a big part of software engineers’ work – they typically can’t stand things being broken or not functioning well and won’t rest until everything’s alright. 

Software engineers are responsible for writing code to build web, mobile, and desktop applications for any purpose and use. They know how to turn a product idea into a technical implementation and support all functionality, whether as simple as “register a user” or as complex as “build graphs combined from 1k lines of data”. 

As long as there are online projects and services, there will always be a demand for software engineers. A full-stack software engineer earns as much as $121,247 annually. However, if you don’t want to work on all parts of the application and choose one specialization instead, you can consider becoming a React engineer for a competitive salary of $113,622, for example. Web developers (junior and middle-level engineers for web applications) are paid $82,660 per year.

Answer three: data scientist 

If you go with option three, why not consider data science? It’s a perfect land for structuring things, having an objective view of data, and making informed decisions. 

Whenever large data collections are available, data scientists are there to properly extract, process, and make conclusions from that information. For example, during the COVID-19 outbreak, data scientists gathered global and local information about the infected, cured, and deceased patients, predicted dynamics, and reported to governments and medical organizations. The latter, in return, made crucial decisions about the volumes of medical material and vaccines needed, based on accurate data. 

Data science is an exciting field in top demand for the next decades. Data scientists are responsible for the breakthrough technologies of the recent decade – AI models. Their work has changed a lot of aspects of our life, so knowledge in data science is currently sought by many companies worldwide.

A data scientist earns $124,371 in the U.S. If you’re more into neural networks and machine learning, count on higher pay as a machine learning engineer, with $132,570 annually. Once you reach senior roles, you advance to a salary of $166,079, while directors of data science can earn $200,014 per year.

Answer four: don’t worry!

It is unlikely that you’ll pick option four (Who wants to cancel their summer vacation?), but now you see how relevant tech is in everyday life. 

With the TripleTen bootcamp, you’ll become a qualified specialist and land a job after eight to ten months of intensive part-time studies. You’ll receive instant feedback on your work, practice your new skills in real-life cases, and get career support to prepare for the job search and interviews. 

If you’re still doubtful about your next step in the tech world, try also take TripleTen’s career quiz or book a call with our advisor to ask any further questions.