Roles in Tech

Projected Time

About 1 hour

• 9 minutes for the video walkthrough of the slides
• 20 minutes for the Group Practice
• 30 minutes for the Independent Practice

Prerequisites

• Professionalism

Motivation

• Your education in full-stack web development is just the first step in your career journey. Just like going to medical school can prepare you to be a researcher in the lab, an oncologist treating seriously ill patients, or a pediatrician working with children, there are many different roles that you can pursue with your new education.
• As you think through the different options to pursue, consider your work style, your interests and other factors that can make a difference in your work environment. Do you like working with people? Consider a customer-facing role such as Customer Success or Sales Engineering. Do you enjoy travel? A solutions consultant may work for several different clients all over a geographic region over the course of a year. Are you motivated by social causes? Consider applying for developer roles at non-profits or other mission-driven organizations.
• This lesson presents a wide variety of jobs that can utilize the skills of a Techtonica graduate.

Read this blog post about a bootcamp student who discovered the field of Sales Engineering

Objectives

Participants will be able to:

• Show understanding of a variety of software engineering specialties
• show understanding of a variety of non-engineer roles in the tech industry
• Talk about how these tech and non-tech roles fit together within a company

Specific Things to Learn

• Web & mobile development job descriptions
• Engineering specialties job descriptions
• Security & testing job descriptions
• Data & analytics job descriptions
• Developer support job descriptions
• Management job descriptions

Materials

• Roles in Tech (video walkthrough of slides)

• Roles in Tech (slides)

Common Mistakes / Misconceptions

• “Since I’m attending a software engineering apprenticeship program, the only job in tech I’ll be able to get after this will be as a junior software engineer.” Programming skills are useful in a wide variety of jobs, not just software engineering jobs. Though we think Techtonica best prepares you for a job as a software engineer, your unique background may lend itself to find work in another field within the tech industry.
• “If I take a non-software-engineering job after Techtonica I’ll be a failure. I’ll have let people down.” We will celebrate your successful career transition regardless of what role you take. Techtonica’s overarching goal is to improve people’s financial stability and career stability. If you take a job that helps you improve these areas of your life, we consider our goal achieved! We also know that some folks might complete the program and be inspired to do non-engineering work. As long as you’re happy, we’re happy.
• “Techtonica guarantees me a job as a software engineer after I complete the program.” Though we do our best to match each apprentice with a sponsor company by the end of the program, we don’t guarantee this outcome. If we aren’t able to match you to a sponsor company, we’ll mentor you through your job search and do our best to help you land your first role in tech.
• “The only employees at a tech company who really matter are the engineers.” Engineers do get a lot of attention but the engineering department is one of many, and every department is essential in a growing company. The marketing department makes sure the product that the engineers built gets out into the world and brings in revenue. The product management department makes sure good and useful products are being built by the engineers. The HR and recruiting departments make sure the best people are hired into the company and that they’re treated well while they’re there. It’s a whole ecosystem, and every person in it has an important role to play.

Group Practice

Collaborate to come up with an email template that can be used to ask for informational interviews. Here are some good tips.

Independent Practice

1. On your own, choose 3 to 5 roles from the lesson that sound interesting to you and do some research on Google and YouTube about those roles. Jot down a few notes about each role, such as what interests you, what you might like about that role, what questions you have about the role, etc.

2. Of the roles you researched, choose the top 2 or 3 that really stand out to you. Using LinkedIn, find 2 or 3 people who work in the Bay Area doing the jobs you’re interested in. Reach out to them and ask for an informational interview using the template we came up with during the Group Practice activity.

3. Go to 2 to 4 informational interviews within the next 30 days and take notes on your conversations. These meetings will count towards your 3 required networking events per month! Be ready to share your notes with the cohort in about a month.

Challenge

On their own, participants can look up job ads for roles they are interested in and make a list of the common skills and job responsibilities needed in order to qualify.

Check for Understanding

A month from now, in a roundtable discussion format, share and compare notes from the conversations had during the project portion of this topic.