How can you work in the tech sector without any experience?
Wondering how you can work in the tech sector, but you have no experience? Well with digital transformation putting traditional hiring practices through their paces, the landscape has changed.
Skills were already evolving faster than they are learnt: suitable candidates were becoming increasingly hard to come by. How did they get to be in such short supply that people could get jobs in tech without prior experience?
As more people began to work remotely, the business landscape changed more in a few months than it had in the previous five years. Traditional businesses tried to hire to increase their digital activity to accommodate evolving users’ and employees’ behaviours.
However, they soon found they were competing with larger and startup technology companies for candidates who could make the transformation they needed: a tech shortage meant the three sectors were struggling to find hires with the traditional set of professional (or “hard”) skills on their CVs.
How to cope with this? HR departments changed hiring practices, looking for the next best thing to experience from candidates: transferable skills.
Change continued apace: after falling at its sharpest rate on record, the UK tech sector rebounded in Q3, its quickest upturn since Q1 of 2019.
As a result, increasingly, it isn’t what you do, but how you work that will get you an interview in tech.
To take advantage of this opportunity, check out our three tips for how to work in the tech sector without experience.
1. Focus on your transferable skills
Transferable (soft skills) vs hard skills such as professional qualifications: both types are important in tech, but hard skills can be taught on the job.
The pandemic and global recession has brought the future of work forward so 40% of UK workers will need reskilling to close skills gaps in the next six months,
That’s why companies are hiring for transferrable skills for the tech industry, those harder for them to teach, those developed from your life and work experiences, such as critical thinking, problem solving, self-management and analysis. These skills have nothing to do with the tech industry in particular.
Despite this, the industry is catching up and it can be hard to showcase these skills in a CV.
On PitchMe, you can create a “soft skills map” visually highlighting skills that have been verified from your CV against other digital sources such as Github and Behance.
2. Expand your skill set in your own time
As mentioned, hard skills are still valuable. And there is still plenty of competition for the best jobs.
In other words, before you apply for your virgin dream tech job, why not take the courses you need to get ahead? You don’t have to be working in the industry to study online where many introductory courses are free.
Looking at a UX designer role? You can complete free courses from PitchMe’s education partners such as ‘Coding for Designers’ (Gymnasium) or ‘Responsive web design’ from Skillshare. Then you can go ahead and build your own website to put your learning into practice and build confidence.
This will also help you to keep your skills updated, as well as relevant to the evolving future of work.
3. Identify the gaps you need to fill
It’s always been time-consuming to compare your CV with the skills a job requires. Throw soft skills – which don’t always appear on a CV – into the mix and it becomes even more challenging.
What if there was a way to definitely know what skills you’re missing?
A platform like PitchMe compares your skill set with those required for certain careers and identifies gaps you need to plug to be a better match. In no time, you will have gained valuable information on your skill set, and how it relates to careers in the tech sector.
We will also point you towards courses that you can do to become more competitive (as mentioned in the previous tip)!
Are you ready to work in the tech sector?
The tech sector is growing and there is a large skills shortage startups, established tech companies and traditional firms need to fill.
Despite this, the industry can seem daunting if you haven’t worked in it before.
However, if you foreground the hard-come-by transferable skills you have accrued through experience, the path to a job from nowhere in tech becomes doable.
Creating an account with PitchMe should be your first steps to this: identify your transferable skills, the careers they are tailored to, and skill gaps you should be filling.
Sign up to PitchMe and create a profile in minutes and you will be able to discover how to work in tech without any experience.
View our most in-demand digital roles on our platform right now.
If you are still struggling, check out our guide for graduates with no work experience HERE!
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