When making a choice about which career to pursue, two of the most important factors to consider are unemployment rates and the base pay for a starting salary. The tech industry excels on both points. Many people entering the technology field have starting salaries of anywhere from $60K per year up to six figures.
Unlike many other industries, the tech industry has a wide array of job openings for employees at every level. Recent graduates typically have an easy time finding work in the tech industry, many of them from majors and backgrounds that might surprise you.
When we speak of tech jobs, most people assume we’re referring to computer programmers or computer-related fields like electrical engineering and information technology. While these jobs are the core of the industry itself, many of the tasks commonly needed in the industry require specialization in other areas that have little to do with technology at all.
People with a knack for art and design, for example, will often find their talents in high demand in front-end development. Web developers have an average salary of $62K per year, with an unemployment rate of about 4%. Those are some pretty attractive stats for anyone seeking to get their foot in the door.
Within web development, there's demand for designers adept at designing the kind of visuals that increase user engagement. In recent years, the user experience (UX) field has grown to the point where most (if not all) web design companies require at least one or two specialists collaborating on any given project. As a newer field, UX is still wide open for anyone who is willing to commit to becoming a guru.
Mastering a particular coding language isn't necessarily the best path to becoming the ideal candidate for a given tech position. The technology industry has evolved over the past couple decades to require that more traditional business skills are now crucial to opening new doors. Information technology managers, for instance, have average salaries of over $100K per year, but many of the positions available include management skills as one of the main components.
While they'll have to learn to think outside of the box, it's clear that people without technical skills can obtain jobs in the tech industry,
If you’re fairly current on news about technology, you’ll have noticed the emerging trend of ‘wearables.’ As the name suggests, wearables are gadgets that people can wear. From watches to necklaces, the wearables industry is being embraced by just about every big technology company out there.
That means that for anyone in the fashion industry, chances are there are openings in the field of wearables. The core of wearables is engineering, but on the surface people using these gadgets demand something fashionable. Put two and two together and you have yourself tech jobs that don’t require much computer acumen at all.
The technology industry is and will always be one of the main areas where there will consistently be a demand for specialists. The only requirement is that every prospective job seeker keep themselves up to date about the latest trends. It wouldn’t hurt to learn how to code or to master the basics of computer science, but technology is about more than just 1’s and 0’s. If you’re willing to look past that and explore the tech landscape, then there are plenty of tech jobs up for grabs.
