How You Can Support Career Changers and Why it’s a Win-Win
Career changers and new starters bring lots of benefits to existing teams.
However many people looking to change to tech roles from other fields find it difficult to make the change.
There are lots of reasons why it‘s so hard to make the change to a new career. Many of them start in your head.
You may have a fear of losing flexibility, or of taking a step backwards. There could be fear or worry about getting to know new people and new systems, of letting your existing employer down, or even letting your family down when living costs are rising.
Or you may fear your own failure.
Scared of changing jobs? Here’s how to tackle your fears’ — SEEK Career Advice
However external factors like lack of support from your team, navigating complex people processes and finding the right people in your organisation also block career changers. Combined with the internal fears, this blocks many people from exploring more fulfilling career paths.
Why take career changers?
- They bring a diversity of experiences for solving problems and improving teams
- Fresh eyes on existing systems or processes brings new ideas
- They can help you tap into under-utilised or under represented talent pools
- Internal mobility between roles can help break down silos with their connections across the organisation
- Give your team a chance to practice other skills outside of the day to day like mentorship and leadership.
Below are the things I learnt that helped me to thrive in a tech team as a Career Changer. I hope my experiences can help your team too.
My Journey as a Career Changer
Customer service and getting curious about tech
I joined SEEK as a customer service representative, helping employers post their job ads on SEEK.
Helping people troubleshoot using the SEEK site, I loved when I could find the right answer to a problem. The best days were when I could fix a technical issue someone had been stuck on for hours and see their relief.
However, I hit a wall eventually in how much I could learn about how the SEEK site and websites worked in Customer Service.
This was the trigger for me to explore my options and try to change my career into tech.
API Support
Moving to Recruitment Software API Support was my first step to understanding our products deeper. My day to day work involved explaining how the SEEK external API worked with employer’s recruitment software. I deepened my knowledge in this role with help from our internal product teams.
After some time in API Support, I realised I wanted to be involved in building the products that I had supported. And that's where I got stuck. Until I got help with a secondment in the Edge Networking team.
Moving from a support role to being in tech engineering is hard. Some of the issues I found challenging were.
- Getting in the door
- Successfully on-boarding into the new role
- Beating imposter syndrome once I was there.
Getting into tech as a career changer
The Challenges
Finding the pathway into a team is hard
The difficulty in changing career paths is often described as a learning curve. There are a lot of topics to cover in a role, but if you learn them one by one, eventually you have changed careers to the new path.
The real difficulty though is finding the right learning curve to start on.
Every role has a set of specific skills it’s looking for. Without help, it’s very easy to try to learn a bit of everything to hedge your bets for multiple types of roles. Slowing down the overall process of learning and keeping you stuck in the current role.
Getting a mentor who can help once you have a path
There are many possible paths to learn in order to change roles. To narrow these down, the next step I took was to find a mentor.
Finding someone is often seen as the hardest part as this requires networking. I breathed a sigh of relief after I had the first conversations about the journey. Feeling confident that one person could see me to my dream role. Then feeling disheartened when I needed to find mentors again.
Career changers need to find mentors several times in their journey to find expertise for the stage they are at.
When put in situations of struggling to get a mentor’s attention, many career changers I spoke with on my journey felt hesitation or anxiety about the success of mentorship in helping them get to their goals.
The Solutions
Teams learning the skills to be active mentors
Not everyone has the time or energy to be an active mentor. Especially if this is a new experience without a playbook on how to help. However mentors can greatly help and benefit from the experience of helping career changers. Here are some concrete things people can do to be more active mentors:
- Narrowing down the context needed to learn.
One great way this was demonstrated during my career change was having a shared Trello board with my mentor. Having less things to learn and more structure on what was key for the role, gave security I was focusing my efforts and could make the change. John Contad has a great article about having better career development conversations. - Setting real and actionable projects to show skills.
Before you can start doing the real work, having small single outcome projects makes a huge difference. However it’s very difficult to know which projects are going to have an impact without knowing the industry. Having some predefined projects that are easy to get feedback on, gives a handhold to keep climbing. The best part is, these don’t have to touch production systems or even use real data. Some of the projects I did were getting my AWS Cloud Foundation Certificate and completing the self paced DevOps Represent workshops. - Set up regular times to catch up and keep them.
It can be hard in busy teams to carve out any time. When trying a new skill it’s hard to know how to proceed. Having a time slot booked and occurring every week or two helps with both of these problems. In my regular catchups with a mentor, we would review any actionable projects we had open and get help to get me unstuck on them. - Actively advocating for career changers to join their team and pushing for diverse voices in technology
It’s hard to know if a team or job will be accepting of you being new or different when you change roles. Especially if you’re not coming from the typical background for that field. Coming into an atmosphere where you know you will be supported from the start because of the actions of your mentors or team, frees up mental energy to learn and succeed.
Trialing the job
Even with a mentor though, there are some questions about the industry or job you want to move to, that likely won’t be answered directly like:
- Will I enjoy the day to day tasks and topics associated with the role?
- Are there any parts of this new role that are deal-breakers?
- How will I handle the hard parts of this new path?
By trying out the job through proof projects, career changers can get the hands on experience and become more confident in the path they choose.
This works out better for teams offering these opportunities as well. By working with someone on a mini project, it helps show how they approach problems eliminating some of the risk of taking on someone new.
What trialing the job looked like for me:
- Volunteering to teach others through DevOps Represent, for workshops on Docker and Terraform
- Writing scripts for processes in API support to practice software development.
Onboarding and adapting to a tech role
Challenges
Setting up tech tools and permissions is harder than the tech itself
Some of the issues I ran into when setting up were:
- Setting up adjacent tools like GPG or API access and running into issues with documentation
- Learning the social practices around the tools — like when to approve or how to write good comments on PR’s in GitHub
- Having to redo the on-boarding multiple times between setting up Windows and then moving to Mac
- Getting the right permissions to do the work when you’re not a new starter.
Being bombarded by an avalanche of information
After getting access to the tools and doing a ‘Hello world’ to test it worked, I was then faced with an all too common problem. I had no idea what anybody was talking about.
Because of the mountain of product terminology, company history, and slang I needed to learn, many early conversations felt hard to follow.
Solutions
Allocate more time to on-boarding and hands on support for success
- The Edge Networking team I joined really sat with me while I struggled to get set up on both a Windows and then later a Mac. While painful, the curiosity they showed to get to the bottom of it helped me make a mental model of what was going on that let me solve problems later and help others.
Start building the career changers mental model of how everything works together
- Welcome questions and have considered discussions about why choices were made. Especially if the questions asked are basic known knowledge. It helps shake out any gaps in training that will trip up many new starters.
The Edge Networking team really helped with this, and made sure that no question felt too dumb to ask. This included lots of conversations about DNS and SSL that I thought I knew but had lots more depth to them.
Have updated documents for system access
- Provide the way to login to systems and the links in your new starter documentation
- Help the new team member set up their own setup notes systems to remember important points
- Make updates to outdated parts for setup steps as you find them when on-boarding a new person
- If there’s gaps in team documentation, a new-starter can volunteer to fill these, upskilling along the way
Beating Imposter Syndrome
Challenges
Dealing with being bad at something new
While new grads and entrants to the workforce have a big adjustment curve, many career changers also have an additional mental hurdle. It’s tricky to adapt to being bad at a job when you have spent time and effort to be good at your old career.
It can be tempting to hide in the back and let others do the work to avoid confronting the unknown. It’s also easy for teams to feel awkward pushing someone uncomfortable. Good intentions leading to an anxiety spiral as time goes on without improvement.
Solutions
Learn in public
The best way to fight the fear and mental stress of being bad in a new team, is to dive in. Learning in public feels high stakes but is a very fast way to desensitise to the work and anxieties around doing it.
Some examples of learning in public during my secondment were
- Our team worked with lots of open-ended meetings where we would collaborate for hours. Going in, this was one of the most intimidating environments, controlling the screen while people watched. But it let me get real time feedback which helped me learn fast.
- Giving me opportunities and pushing me to present in front of people or go to events to meet people. This included presenting in front of lots of people the feature we had just built and getting me to go to the programmable tech conference. And to write this blog post about my experience in the team.
Do real work
- Getting involved even from day one in the real work the team was doing despite my lack of knowledge. I learnt so much about Terraform and build pipelines by building these and making mistakes myself instead of only watching someone else do it.
- Thoughtful PR’s I could review in my own time were great for improving my coding skills. These were my first professional reviews, and it was such an important part that was missing when I self-studied coding.
Keeping setbacks in perspective
- Using “Yes and…” thinking.
This comes from improv as a way to take on other ideas without being overwhelmed or shutting them down. It helped me rephrase thoughts like “You made a mistake there so you’re always going to be bad at this role” into “Yes you made a mistake there, and what can we do to fix it?”. - Having consistent feedback from the team about my progress helped keep my progress in perspective. The team celebrated a lot of my small wins and cheered me on. Having real examples of progress was important to reduce the feelings of overwhelm or impostor syndrome.
Conclusion: By supporting career changers with common pitfalls, they can bring value sooner and help bring a diversity of experiences to teams.
I’m very grateful to have had the chance to try a career change first hand. I hope that some of the tips in here can inspire you if you are on the same journey.
