There is this huge misconception that in order to break into tech you need to learn how to become a programmer. So, in this article, I will break that myth and go over 7 high-paying non-coding jobs in tech to the qualifications and backgrounds required for each of these and three. My tips on how to break into the role.
I’m quite excited about this one, So, before I continue with the, I’m going to compare it to as if we’re building a dream house for wealthy clients and outsourcing it fully, and that’s because I’ve always found relating new concepts. Two things I’m fairly familiar with to help with my understanding.
With that said, let’s get started with the first one. In the context of building a dream house, we need someone to own a division to understand our client’s dream houses and to make high impact decisions throughout the project. In the world of property development, you might call this person the lead architect. Similarly, in the world of tech we want to take, for example, built a banking app. We would need the services of a product manager
A product manager to help us shape the vision of the app. Built out a list of value-adding features, also known as a road map, assist with the positioning of the app on the market and finally act on our behalf as the main stakeholder of the project, the vast majority of product managers don’t have any programming background and actually tend to come from research it or even business and design background.
Because this is a world that is truly at the intersection of business engineering and design. In my opinion, this is best suited for someone who’s a natural-born problem solver, is creative, and has a good eye for design and business acumen. And what I mean by having business acumen is that you have to be able to prioritize and make decisions that work for the business you work for and most often than not, these decisions will have a dollar value assigned to them.
If this is something that you’re looking to explore, get yourself a scrum product owner or agile project management certificate. It is not mandatory to be certified. It would definitely help with the job hunt. I would also read a book called Inspired by Marty caging. Now that we have a product manager to own the vision of the new banking app, we need someone to help us stay on top of three things. The time, the cost, and the deliverables, or in other words, how long will everything from planning to design and the coding to launch take, but also what will it cost us both will make materials so the cost of goods and costs of the team on the ground.
In the context of building a property, you need concrete words, cement, steel bricks from a pure material perspective. But also, you need people on the ground like builders, electric engineers, painters, interior designers and so on. But also, we need to stay on top of the agreed deliverables and manage any risk that derails us from delivering these. And just like in the world of property development in software and tech, every team is likely to need a project manager. Also sometimes referred to as a delivery manager in some companies to be accountable and oversee the time, costs, and deliverables of the project.
The project manager also helps the team to stay on track with the agreed budget plan. Major milestones, manage things like expenses as well as manage third-party supplier relations, and most importantly set the team up for success from my project management process perspective.
This role would suit someone who’s a great communicator and is good with managing people, timelines, and budgets, but also someone who is naturally organized. So if you’ve been complimented for your digital savviness, your ability to work well with people and stay organized. Maybe you should look into becoming a project manager to get started.
I would try to get certified in an agile project management certificate. In order to make data-driven or data-informed decisions when it comes to building this new banking app with all these new features and road maps, we should be relying on the services of a researcher.
The researcher helps the product manager and the team with data to prevent making subjective non-value-adding decisions like designing and building features that no one wants or that no one is going to use, and in order to stay as objective as possible, UX researchers collect both quantitative and qualitative data, and they feed that back to the product manager and the team in order to help inform their strategy.
For qualitative research, they might be doing activities like competitive research, conducting one-to-one user, interviews, focus groups, and so on. And for quotative research, which is equally as insightful.
If our banking app is already on the market and it’s being used as a researcher. You’d be looking at user data to determine where users are dropping off. How easy are they to find the navigation and also use the data to uncover usability issues anywhere within the banking app.?
This is best suited if you generally enjoy doing research on human psychology uncovering insights and you have an analytical mind? If this is up to your street, I would pick up a book called UX Research Practical Techniques for better products.
Have you ever used a site or app? And while it looked pretty good, it was a nightmare to actually use it. The navigation was hard and the interface wasn’t intuitive at all. There is a saying in the industry which is that if you need to teach people how to use your app then you’ve already overcomplicated the best apps and websites. Other ones are easy and intuitive to use, and this is where a UX designer becomes useful.
A UX designer is accountable to ensure that what we design and build is useful, usable, and valuable.
The importance of a great user experience also extends to products and tools we use in our daily lives. For example, while a card dashboard looks beautiful, you might argue that using it on a daily basis, it’s not really the most practical and user-friendly as a driver. You want to keep your eyes on the road instead of fiddling with touch screens just to change it. And contrary to the belief in large organizations, UX designers don’t design the actual final interfaces Instead, they wrecked designers, and produce things like storyboards, customer journey maps, wireframes, and sitemaps which are all useful activities and tools to help visualize the user’s actions and environment.
In order to design for their problems and needs in a way that is intuitive. So, if you think UX is something interesting, I would start by educating myself on Nielsen Norman group principles and articles on your ex is a great resource platform with lots of free content. Neither the UX designer has carefully laid out the experience of the new feature in detail. It’s not time to build beautiful and useful-looking visuals, more cops, and interactions in a world of property development.
This would be the role of an interior designer. One of the biggest misconceptions about it, the UI designer is confusing it with a graphic designer. And just because someone is really great at Photoshop and is able to design stunning logos and banners, designing an iOS or Android app takes a completely different skill set.
On one hand, you’re designing a banner or logo that’s meant to be just looked out with zero interactions, and on one hand, you design an app that’s designed for a thumb that’s meant to be allowing people to use a complex user flow. Of course, it helps if you have a background in graphic design.
One of the best ways to break into the industry as a UI designer Is to learn tools like Figma or Sketch and Start designing apps and websites in public share your work with the outside world and keep an eye out for Junior UI designer positions. Alright, so two more words to go and the first one is the role of a business analyst.
Business Analyst.
Business analysis is one of the key roles in tech as they help the team in two main ways. One, they worked with the designers and translate all the agreed user experience flows diagrams and user interface it is a set of very clear requirements that the code is come back up and implemented when it comes to complex software development.
It’s incredibly important to communicate clearly and to ensure seamless handovers between the design phase and the coding phase to Illustrate how business analysts work with designers and coders. Let me give you the following example. If you were to ask me to make you a cup of tea with a bit of milk and two spoons of sugar and two minutes later, I come back with a cup of tea with a bit of milk and two spoons of sugar. But you taste it and you go well.
This wasn’t actually what you had in mind. Firstly, you wanted the milk to be skimmed milk. Secondly, you want to duty in a takeaway cup. Thirdly, you wanted brown sugar instead of white. Now of course software development is far more complex than making a cup of tea, hence why business analysts are so important in building great products the second-way business analysts help the team is that in some scenarios there might be problems that we can’t solve in our own in-house engineering team and we need to look elsewhere, like for example third-party tools.
Business analysts can help us with those problems this role would ideally suit someone who’s quite digitally savvy and has a background without knowing anything about calling again, most beers I know don’t know how to cook but you should familiarize yourself with some business analyst best practices and a great resource for this is a free platform called business analysts experts that come.
Alright, so now that we have the product manager who has strategically prioritized the next few features of the banking app based on data that was supplied by the UX researcher, a great design that was translated into a set of clear requirements by the business analyst that then went on to be coded by the programmers, we’re now one step away from launch. But before we can launch, we need to test if everything works as expected.
Quality Taster
Quality taster also start to test the system on how it would go under extreme circumstances and see if things are breaking to do that, we can employ the skills or make a quality assurance engineer who’s someone that test the app on different platforms, devices, screen sizes, browsers and so on, and they give the part of the manager and the team the green light to launch the next version of the app.
So, if you’re the type of person to be noticing small mistakes and issues when you’re browsing the Internet and using your favorite apps, maybe you should look into becoming a quality assurance tester. I would start off by trying to become certified as a software quality assurance tester.
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