This article will highlight the meaning of tech career roadmap, the lessons learnt from the video Designing a tech career roadmap by Yewande Odumosu and how I intend to apply the lessons learnt in my tech career journey.

Meaning of Tech Career Roadmap

What is a tech career roadmap?

I will start my writing by explaining what the word career meant:

A Career can be defined as an individual's course of work or learning progress through life. It is also described as an occupation or a profession that usually involves special training or formal education, considered to be a person's lifework. [According to the balance career,] (thebalancecareers.com/what-is-a-career-525497) A career can also refer to your profession or chosen line of work, which can include one job or multiple jobs. It also refers to the education, training, and experience needed to grow in your current role or move on to another one.

When we talk about tech career, we are talking about a chosen line of work/profession in the technological field. So, with this said, tech career roadmap can be defined as a compass or guide which an individual uses to help guide them to plan or showcase in a more complete way, how their career journey progress has moved from the early stage to a more sustainable development stage.

Ideas learnt on how to design a roadmap

From Yewande Odumosu's teaching, I was able to understand the following.

• To design a tech career roadmap, one must first of all evaluate where they are presently by understanding & taking into account how far they have gone in their career journey and if they are in the beginning or middle of their tech journey.

• In order to be able to properly achieve the evaluation of oneself, it is paramount to ask yourself the following questions.

  1. Who am I?
  2. What do people say am good at?
  3. What aspect of my work/course do I enjoy the most?
  4. What motivates me?
  5. What do I find myself doing in my spare time? etc. And as one start evaluating themselves, they start understanding what their personality aligns with and where they want to go in their career.

• Secondly, as an individual you need to identify your unique skills, that is the skills that come easily to you and the ones that has been developed over time.

• Finally, another step one can take is understanding one's strengths & skills. Skills are qualities which an individual developed to help them gain expertise in specific areas of their life. This is very important because according to her, skills can be transferable and understanding your strengths & skills will help you to understand how your tech career roadmap will look like and how can be able to present yourself when the opportunity arise.

There are two types of tech career roadmap and they are; Linear and Non-linear career roadmaps. A linear career roadmap is a roadmap whereby an individual picks up a certain career path in the early stage and continues on that path systematically until he/she gets to the final stage of the career path. For example: An individual can start as an Engineering intern, after a couple of years, she moves to Junior Developer, from there moves to Mid-level Developer continues and moves to Senior Developer, to Team Lead, to Principal Officer and then to Chief Technological Officer Engineering.

According to Yewande most people thinks and believes that this is how a real tech career roadmap should look like but in the real sense, a real-life roadmap does not always follow this sequence. Rather it follows the non-linear career roadmap.

A non-linear career roadmap is a roadmap whereby an individual picks up a certain career path in the early stage but along the line finds out that he/she no longer enjoys the path and decides to switch to the career path which they found themselves recently interested in, and from there switch again to another path which they think the opportunity is worth trying out. They can continue in this way until they reach final stage of their career path. Example: An individual can start as a Design intern and after working for a couple of years as a designer, she might decide to move into software development and work for another couple of years as a full stack Junior Developer and from there moves to Mid-level Backend Developer and continues to a Product Manager and from there moves to Senior Product Manager and continues to Chief Product Officer and then to CEO.

I learnt that although, many people think that it's difficult to switch careers but in the real sense there are so many ways one can easily switch between careers, and this can be done comfortably due to the transferable skills which one already have and due to this, once the opportunity arrives it is easy to switch to a new career by demonstrating that you have some form of knowledge or awareness about the role you intends to switch into. According to Yewande it does not mean that one is losing focus, rather it only means that as one grows higher in one's career, you are learning more about yourself and the things that aligns with your personality. She continued by saying that the important thing is to continue improving oneself and go for the opportunities that aligns with you in order to avoid struggling in your career path.

Finally, I learnt that there are no right, or wrong roadmap and one have the permission to be whatever you want to be, and all that is required is just hard work.

How to transition into tech

1. One of the ways in which one can transition into tech is by exploring one's interest, and this can be done by surfing the internet to find out information about the career paths which you are interested in.

2. Take an introductory course to see if the career path aligns with what you love to do, and if it does you can continue in your path but if it doesn't, leave the path and go try out other things that interests you.

3. After taking the course, try out a side project or volunteer to do projects in order to practice what you learnt.

4. Join your career path community: Joining a community will help you get exposed to learn more about the career path which you have chosen.

5. Get a mentor online or offline, who you can interact and learn from in order to improve in your path.

6. Identify your transferable skills and highlight them on your resume/cv.

7. Build on your new knowledge and start applying for jobs or opportunities.

To conclude my writing, I would say that as an individual who is transitioning into the tech career world, I will make sure to follow the processes which I have learnt and written down from the video and be willing to be proactive, visible and always be valuable in all that I find myself doing.

Reference:

[What Is a Career?] (thebalancecareers.com/what-is-a-career-525497)

[Designing A Tech Career Roadmap by Yewande Odumosu] (youtu.be/EZ6oX7HvAHA)