Watch This to Get Started in Tech! (No Experience)

hey youtube i'm jalana and this is the tech flex if this is your first time coming to my channel welcome if you watched my videos before welcome baxters so today we're going to talk about how to break into tech so as you know or may not know i was featured on the shaded room as a black woman in tech and i gained a lot of new subscribers on youtube and new followers on my insta vlog at the tech flex on instagram and i just want to say thank you for all the positive comments i got so much positive feedback from that feature and i'm just really excited and grateful for you know what's to come on this channel and i hope that i can continue providing good content and you know just continue to help more people break into the second street and with that being said let's run at the back speak to us it's time to run up we're done saying we're gonna play in and we're coming for everything that it's owed to us and that's just so the question that i got the most over the last week or so is how can i get started in tech and that is really why i wanted to make this video first because so many people ask this question and it's a very broad question so i kind of wanted to just explain a little bit to everyone how you can get started regardless of what your niche is so with that being said let's get into it y'all already know i'm back again with another ootd do y'all like when i do these let me know in the comments i'm going absolutely nowhere but that ain't on your don't y'all hate when people comment on your pictures and be like but where are you going girl i'm going to take pictures mind your business [Music] but anyway girl let's get back to the video [Music] first you're going to want to research different tech careers within the tech industry there are both technical paths as well as non-technical career paths that you can choose from some of the career paths in the technical industry would include cyber security web development i.t support software engineering data science data analytics and many more and even within those career paths there are a lot of roles available so like for example cyber security is also another large umbrella within cyber security you can be an ethical hacker or a cyber security analyst or a network engineer so you want to kind of get an idea of at least that niche like whether it's cybersecurity or software engineering just to get started and then maybe later on you can kind of determine after researching and things like that what specific roles you're interested in to get started some of the non-technical roles include text sales project management product management ui ux and even some of those roles can kind of be a little bit technical like ui can be technical to some people seeing that you have to use html and css product management can easily become technical if you're a technical product manager which if you're in the tech industry you probably are but overall there's a lot of flexibility as far as how technical you want your non-technical job to be or if you wanted to be extremely non-technical so it really just depends on what you're interested in after you finish watching this video be sure to check out my video on non-technical roles in the tech industry just so you can get a few examples to get you started and i'll also be making a part two of that soon as well so it's really important for you to figure out what career path you want to go down first before doing anything else so a lot of things that i'm going to talk about like networking skills certifications and things like that you won't even know what to do unless you at least figure out what career paths you're interested in first so like i said i got a lot of comments and messages saying how can i get started in tech and it's like it's really hard to answer that question if you don't know what part of the industry you want to be a part of there's so many different parts and that's the beauty of it is that you can find something that you're interested in just figure out what you're interested in what you wouldn't mind doing and start from there so one thing that really helped me pick my specific career path is attending meetups so i did talk about this in my how to become a software engineering video i pretty much attended these events so that i could talk to software engineers and data scientists and just kind of like hear why they chose their specific career path and honestly that helped me a lot because i had more opinions that i could use to help me weigh my options and eventually i made the decision to become a software engineer along with research you definitely want to watch a lot of youtube and look up a lot of articles i youtubed myself to death when i was trying to make my decision and when i was trying to go through this process like i watch youtube so much you can look up videos like a day in life as a cyber security analyst or a daily life as a software engineer or a work vlog as a tech sales representative or something like that um there's so many different videos out there i would look up videos on how i became a software engineer how i got into ux like whatever videos you can find for the specific career path that you're interested in watch them because that's also a good way to help you learn a lot about your specific niche and just educate yourself so next is skills and certifications each career path has its own set of skills and certifications that can make you marketable for that specific career path there are so many different ways to obtain skills and there are so many different ways to receive certification especially at like a low cost so you definitely want to consider all your options to figure out what can make you marketable for that career path it's not always necessary to get certifications but sometimes it is helpful especially if you're someone who doesn't have a degree or doesn't have any experience things like certifications can definitely help boost your resume but like i said they're not always necessary for example an aspiring software engineer might not need any certifications but it's probably more useful for you to focus on your skill set and master things like data structures so that you can better prepare for interviews however for other fields such as cyber security or cloud computing certifications might make it easier for you to break into the field definitely check out companies such as google amazon and oracle because they do have a lot of their own certifications that will look really good on your resume like how cool would it be to have a certification that's straight from google another platform that i really like is edx because i think edx is actually created by mit and harvard and basically their purpose is to allow you know underrepresented underrepresented and low economic students receive certifications in education without paying a high price so there's a lot of courses and certifications out there on that website that you can take advantage of from top institutions such as harvard mit georgia tech they even have a few from different companies like ibm and it's just a really cool website to get a few you know credentials under your vote i have actually taken a few courses from edx and interviewers always think that is so cool when they see harvard on my resume i'm telling y'all interviewers eat that stuff up like they love seeing me having harvardx on my resume they always ask about it and i always explain what edx is and how it started and why i chose to take advantage of those courses and how i wanted to teach myself it's like it's just the perfect opportunity to gash yourself up and sound like you're someone who is capable of teaching yourself things that you can learn things on the fly it's just it's just a win-win so definitely look into things like that and if you were anything like me i had nothing else to talk about but my certifications and my projects that i made in my classes because i didn't have any experience so it was just good that i could have some things on my resume for me to back about so i'm basically like i don't have experience but i have this cool project for beauty i have this certification from harvardx girl you have to literally fake it till you make it because what else do you possibly what else do you do ask for learning skills make sure that you utilize crap as for learning sales make sure that you use platforms such as youtube coursera linkedin learning udemy there's so many different platforms out there that are very affordable like i said one of my videos i bought two courses that had like 30 hours each of content for less than 30 dollars for both on udemy so there's a lot of affordable courses out there hey guys i also forgot to mention about bootcamps if you are looking to go into a more technical field like software engineering or cyber security or data analytics or even ui ux there are a lot of great boot camps out there that will teach you everything that you need to know as well as help you prepare for job searching but if you are starting in tech completely from scratch and you don't really know a lot and you know that you don't want to teach yourself a bootcamp is another great way to learn the skills that you need to break into the industry and lastly of course you have the option to pursue a two-year or a four-year degree as well definitely make sure that you research things like the cost the time frame and keep all those things into consideration so the next step is definitely to network so as i said earlier it's really important for you to network with people who are both in your career and people who are aspiring to break into your career path as well so this will kind of help you learn more about your niche through both formal and informal conversation for me the people that i network with helped me a lot through my interviewing process it was really cool to hear about their interview process and every time we have interviews we just kind of bounce ideas back and forth about how we would have solved this problem differently or answered this question differently and it was just really nice to have a small village we also helped each other prepare for interviews we gave each other mock interviews so all of that which is really helpful throughout my journey i met a lot of people through meetups so i really didn't have to do this but another thing that you can do that i did while i was in college is reach out to people on linkedin you can connect with people who are in your aspiring career path and just kind of ask them questions about how they got into the field what they like about it what they don't like about it and any advice that they have for someone who is trying to break into that field the next step is to do projects depending on your field this step might be optional like if you're in tech sales you probably don't need to be doing any projects to break into the industry but if you are someone like a front end software engineer or like aspiring front end software engineer then you probably want to do some type of web app project so that you can talk about those things in your interview this part can actually come very easily because like i said there are a ton of courses out there that are either free or very inexpensive and those courses will walk you through projects if you find the right one and i used a course on udemy where it was like 30 hours of content the course was like 12 and i built like four or five projects just with that course alone and those are the projects that i put on my resume and talked about during my interview process so next you need to market yourself and by market yourself i mean fix up your linkedin and fix up your resume i understand that a lot of people do struggle with resume writing i honestly don't like writing resumes at all but with a lot of practice and a lot of googling i've gotten better at it over the years if you really struggle with writing resumes you can definitely hire a resume writer or a cover letter writer one pro tip that i will share with y'all is definitely make your resume on google docs that way you can easily share the link with people and make the settings so that they can comment only so that people can give you feedback on your resume so i sent the link to my resume to a bunch of my friends to just review check for grammatical errors or things that just don't make sense and i got a lot of good feedback on my resume so that i was able to make changes it's a lot harder to share documents with microsoft word and it's just doing so much so just try to make your resume in a google doc if you can pro tip number two is to use etsy for resume templates they have templates that are like four dollars two dollars no more than like ten dollars and they do have google doc formats as well and we all know that everything on etsy is so cute so there's a lot of really nice clean formats and whenever i'm helping someone write their resume i always point them to sd first to get a nice template unless you are a graphic designer or someone who's just really good at designing things zone don't try to design your own template it's going to look a mess don't don't don't don't do it on average recruiters only look at resumes for six seconds so you want the layout to be perfect and very legible outside of resumes your linkedin is so so so important if you don't have a linkedin please create one if you have all the buzzwords for your industry or the career path that you're trying to go down you'll get a lot of recruiters in your messages that's just a way that recruiters find people is through linkedin and people will really slide in your linkedin dms asking you to interview if you play your cards right instead of your linkedin correctly i'm telling y'all when i was job searching like 60 of the interviews that i got were literally from people just messaging me on linkedin i'm not anyone special i did not have any experience at the time i simply just had the buzzwords on my linkedin and that attracted a lot of recruiters to my messages asking me to interview definitely set your profile to open to work so that recruiters can know that you're available for new opportunities once you write your resume perfecting your linkedin will be a piece of cake because you're literally just taking those same bullet points and adding them to your profile so you're using your experience and adding that to your linkedin you're going to take the skills that you listed on your resume and add those to your linkedin if you already have a cover letter you can easily take a few sentences out of your cover letter and just rephrase them so that you can have a linkedin summary and again like i always say research research what should be on your linkedin what should be on your resume for your desired career path so that's really important look at some articles look at some youtube videos you have to be comfortable with research especially if you want to go to the tech industry so that's all the tips that i have for you all today i hope that these tips can help you get started on your new journey please keep me updated in the comments as to how things are going i'd love to know what phase you are in in this process if you have finally determined your career path let me know in the comments as well i really want y'all to keep you updated i think the most important thing to gather from this video is the power of researching as someone who's in the tech industry you are going to be researching a lot especially if you're in a technical role and it's just better to just exercise that skill set now especially if you're not familiar with tech the only way to get familiar with it is by researching stepping outside of your shell and just constantly trying to learn something new every day you should learn something new the tech industry is a very rewarding industry to be a part of and i really hope that this video helps everyone get started if you have any questions please put them in the comments and i'll do my best to address anyone's concerns if you found the information in this video useful please like comment and subscribe i would really appreciate that and i'll catch you guys next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Jelanah

Views: 4,406

Keywords: Watch This to Get Started in Tech!, software engineering, software developer, life in tech, women in tech, black in tech, tech job, tech careers, jobs with no degree, tech jobs with no degree, faang, metaverse, cyber security, jobs in tech, tech jobs, how to get started in tech, watch htis to get started in tech!, software developer interview, software engineering salary

Id: oBpEI22flv4

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 29 2021