It is surprising to see that many do not know what is the IT role they are applying during a job interview. In a way, we should reflect and see how society have confused these younglings about IT careers in our education system.

Understand IT Career

Like all industry, IT are diverse and span many verticals and specialisations. Unfortunately, many have the misconception of labelling IT as a coder role or someone who works with computer. However, IT career is much more than that. It is common to see that most of us started off as either a technical role or functional one. Around 20% may cross both roles and become techno-functional . Some will specialise in a particular business domain while others focus in the IT aspects across different verticals. Although diversity is good in your early career, you should reach a steady state by your midlife.

Your Personality

A common question by freshie is how should you start IT career. Usually, I like to view the personality of the person to match the starting point. As an analogy, a good swimmer can never excel by starting on a running track. A technical role is often logical and suits more towards introverted personality. On the other hand, functional role rely more on the understanding of user behaviour and business processes. There is an emerging demand for techno-functional role. This role is the most challenging because you will need to leverage on your “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” personality.

What I mention is a simple quick way to evaluate and start your career. The better you understand your personality, the faster you have advantage on the starting point.

Coding is not difficult to master if you are good at logic. However, how do you learn to code smarter than the rest of people? You can learn these tricks from my personal cookbook.

1. The more you code, the shorter it gets.
2. Simple logic works faster and more efficiently.
3. Dare to rewrite and recode. Same rationale as point 1.
4. If you find it hard to read, the computer will find it hard as well.
5. Learn to understand the domain knowledge. This helps to select the right logic codes to fit task.
6. If the decision making logic is more than 5 to 8. Consider to optimise it to reduce to 5.
7. Speed is better than elegant codes. Users can feel the performance but cannot read how elegant is your coding.
8. Know the cost of SQL. 1 long complex SQL is slower than few few simple ones.

It is good habit to know the timing of your codes. With practice, you will be smart to code for performance and maintainability.

We often review technical skillset for different projects. In our evaluation, we notice similarities in many candidates on their programming languages. So, how do you really differentiate what you want? I will liken coding to sport players at times. There are technical, flair or elegant coders similar to star players in a soccer team. The question is how to you spot this gems?

Quick Tips

• Who are you looking for? A star player, coding machine, or a problem solver.
• Set a benchmark on the types of resources.
• Look for project trends and the role they play.
• Ask specific scenario based questions to the role you want.

If you are a coder yourself, ask yourself which role you play best! The best fit will bring out your best performance. If you are hiring for one, what coder you need to make up the rest of your team?

Recently, I am bemused with many freshies out of school with claims of being a full stack and very long list of technical skills. The role of full stack may exaggerated and taken out of context. It seems there are no consideration to what is being taught and what is being practiced. It is pretty easy for an experienced person to comprehend what your full stack really means. Before you start calling yourself a full stack, you can try a simple checklist on yourself.

• Have you implement and deploy at least 5 projects end to end? Projects, not school homework.
• Are you comfortable in configuring and setting up server, database and web framework?
• Are you adaptable in all forms of coding style and syntax?
• Can you evaluate and provide solutions to real business problems?
• Do you have moderate domain knowledge for at least one industry?

In short, the skillset of full stack is similar to techno-functional role. It is not possible to acquire full stack capabilities straight out of school. In the real world, the “homework” is much unpredictable and only life practice can teach you the skills you need to be a full stack.

The Hype of Digital Transformation give rise to a sudden surge for IT jobs. In the wake of COVID-19, demand of IT jobs become stronger. There are also many who have made the switch from non-IT to IT skillset. While the hype is there, should you jump to the bandwagon?

Here are some reasons that you should not unless…

• Always work for your passion, not to chase the trend.
• IT is a constant upgrading career. Be resilient and enter at your own risk.
• There is a demand for flexible skillset, which is techno-functional skill or pseudo coding. A lot list of technical skills are the norm now. A showcase of technical skills or full stack is what everyone have now.
• Taking IT course does not give you a ticket to IT career. Embrace what you learn and apply it to your daily life. Build your personal website or mobile application.
• Code for love and love to code!

Lastly, practice makes perfect! All coding are 1 and 0. Knowing different coding does not give you the USP. The key is to know your strengths and weaknesses. Do know where you want to be in 5 or 10 years time!