Second Step In Your Tech Career Learning

In my previous article, link given above, I wrote how to start learning a programming language. Now you have achieved that, you can give a pat on your back and take the next step in your technology career learning. Those steps differ as per your career interest. That's the core topic of this article.

Everyone will have a technology career aspiration.

Few would want to go and work for big product-based companies like Google, Microsoft, or Amazon.

Many would love to work in the startup ecosystem.

The rest would love to get into IT services companies like Accenture, TCS, Wipro, Infy.

Your learning should align with your aspiration reason is, preparation for these are not the same.

Let's see in detail what will be the expectation for the above-said goals and how you should prepare.

I am interested in working in product companies (Google, Amazon, or any product company)

Product companies will look for deep problem-solving expertise. It means algorithmic thinking. Many tech challenges they solve require one to have good knowledge of various algorithms and writing efficient code.

Given a problem statement, how is your approach to solving the same?

Such an expectation requires you to prepare well in data structures & algorithms, work out many coding challenges from websites like leetcode, hackerrank, etc.,

These companies will give you the freedom to choose a programming language that you are comfortable with to solve challenges given to you during your interview process.

So, post your language learning, you need to go in-depth in learning, data structures & algorithms, don't rush to finish everything key here is how much you have truly understood.

It will be a multi-round iterative study process. While learning these, start solving coding problems by registering yourselves in leetcode or hackerrank (I don't represent these companies, just giving suggestions in my article). I see several positive reviews for algoexpert also.

The duration will take you to be good at these, and confidently apply for a job will be around nine months to 1 year.

I am keen to work in a startup.

If your goal is to work in a startup and make a career out of working in various startups and maybe one day start your own, you need to be a person who loves to live on the technology edge.

It means you should be focusing on technology areas not looked upon by the mainstream tech companies. A startup is in existence because founders got an innovative idea. They implement it to gain success in the market that is not looked upon by many.

It involves technologies that are still in the "Technology Trigger" phase of their hype cycle. In this infant stage of technology, only a startup will pick up that and start building solutions based on that. I have given the Gartner hype cycle published in July 2020 for reference to see where the startup-ecosystem is investing their money.

Apart from this, some startups try to make existing systems better or innovate a new solution based on an existing market for these, and for what mentioned above, you need to be strong in your problem-solving and algorithmic thinking. So, you should follow the steps recommended to get into a product company, and along with it, your focus should be on learning new technologies that are mainstream yet.

The duration will take you to be good at these, and confidently apply for a job will be around nine months to 1 year.

I am interested in developing my career in a services company

A company that provides technology services, in general, is called a services company. In India, the most well-known services companies are Infosys, Wipro, HCL, TCS, Accenture, to list a few.

Preparation to get into these companies are different from those who aspire to work in a product or a startup company.

Here, the challenge is to interact with different clients, understand their requirements, work on them to deliver them successfully. There will be multiple reporting structures in your organization, so communication skills are important I want to insist on this, develop your communication skills (writing and speaking).

In terms of technical knowledge, you will not be expected to solve complex tech challenges, but you need to write good quality code to deliver business application features.

Apart from understanding requirements, design, and write code, you will additionally be expected to wear many hats (this is becoming more prevalent post covid market) on a complex project.

So, your preparation should be like this. Learn how to design, code(which you learned by learning a language), write and execute tests, deploy the app and monitor the same.

The attitude for such a person should be to be open to learn any new tech thrown at them. Mostly, your organization will not have a resource with that skill, or even if such a resource is available, they may be busy with other projects, and your project timeline does not allow you to wait for them.

Hence, you will be asked to learn and do.

Learning data structures and few basic algorithms is enough. You need to focus on end-to-end software development and tools used in those phases.

So the breadth of learning is required here.

The duration will take you to be good at these, and confidently apply for a job will be around three months to six months.

The End

In this article, I have given the path one should take based on one's career aspiration. It holds good irrespective of which year you are starting. You can be a fresher or a person, who is working in other industries but want to get into IT, or a person who is in a non-technical role in IT and wants to get into the technology space.

In case you need any help message me here and if you like this article, reshare it, let the like button go mad :) and share your thoughts as comments.