Knowing What To Do With Your Skills
When I was in school, two pathways were suggested to the majority of students:
- Go to University for whatever you enjoyed
- Learn a trade
The latter was incredibly popular, and dozens upon dozens of guys every single year for however long this was the general advice took up the various trades. Great job! Because there was a current drought of tradesmen, it was considered a great career choice.
Except in a lot of cases, it wasn’t.
Here’s the issue: when you read in the newspapers that there’s a “lack of qualified work” and there’s a five year training period, you’re five years behind the competition.
In other words, by the time a lot of those guys got out of trade school, the jobs were taken. Some of those jobs were automated. Some were taken by foreign workers. A lot were outsourced fully and the rest taken by people who’d been doing it for years who had to take pay cuts due to the recession.
Does this mean the trades are a non-starter forever from now on?
Absolutely not.
But if you hear the above, it sounds eerily familiar.
I’m talking about white collar services now. Specifically tech, although the problem applies to pretty much any white collar profession.
The issue isn’t “Is this a valuable skill?”
It’s knowing what to do with the skills you learn. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in tech, an arts graduate or a blue-collar tradesman.
There are gaps in any market and you can fill them with your skills and knowledge.
Knowing what to do is industry specific, audience specific and problem specific.
STEM Job Opportunities and Writing Job Opportunities
There are a lot of STEM students who think that learning to code is going to have them as made men by the time they’re twenty-eight.
Not if you’re learning basic “You can learn it on Udemy” coding and more importantly, not if you don’t have a clue what you’re going to code.
For all a lot of STEM graduates harp on about people with arts degrees, they’re in exactly the same boat.
If you think you’re going to get a bog-standard tech degree, roll up to Silicon Valley and be offered a job that leads to millions in income in a few short years…
… You’re exactly the same as the writer who thinks they’re going to place their first novel with a publishing house and become the next J.K. Rowling.
Opportunities Are In How You Apply, Not What You Know
I’ve had more than one person tell me something to the effect;
“Tech is the future and the job marketplace for coders is only going to expand.”
This is absolutely true. Some doom-and-gloomers will say, “Yeah but Indian freelancer coding blah blah blah.”
That’s also true. Hence my section above: If you think that you can simply “learn code” and think that that’s going to save you from the robots, Indian freelancers and other sources of “talent coming to steal your job” then you’re going to have a nasty surprise.
That said… tech is everywhere. It’s going to be more places. To my horror, I got an ad the other day for an Internet Of Things Dog Treat Dispenser with a screen so that when you’re at work, you can talk and give a treat to your dog.
Hello Dystopia. But the very existence of a product like that means that tech is going nowhere fast and yet it’s going to be everywhere.
Rightly so… algorithms can crunch data faster than a human can and if I can leave my computer to do a task on autopilot whilst I drink tea (or talk to my hypothetical dog via my smartphone) then great.
But here’s the thing…
Your fresh-eyed computer tech graduate just getting out of tech-wizardry school and looking for a job at Google isn’t going to be the guy that launches the IoT dog feeding start up.
It’s probably going to be a dog owner who gets tired of his dog chewing up the furniture while he’s at work.
You Need To Get A Life
All the tech knowledge in the world isn’t going to help you if you sit in front of a computer all day writing code and talking to your friends on tech subreddits. It’s even worse if your social life consists of sitting on said subreddits sharing jokes about how you’re superior for doing STEM and those arts graduates are going to be serving you coffee.
When you’re a tech student- be that officially “getting a degree” student or just some guy watching YouTube videos in his spare time – you need to think about potential routes into specific industries.
The IoT dog feeder thing was almost certainly a cheap prototype built with a Raspberry Pi and some electronics YouTube videos, but stuff like that can raise hundreds of thousands on KickStarter.
Unless you’re specifically on track to “land the big one” and work in Silicon Valley, then it’s likely you’ll be more successful building your own dog feeder than you would be getting a generic white collar programming job.
This involves getting a life, and by that I mean looking for little opportunities that are outside what your STEM student friends are doing yet still apply the skills you’re building. Stuff like:
- IoT EVERYTHING
- Automated farming
- Apps for financial services (Think about something like Personal Capital or even price comparison websites. They’re essentially organisers that pull people’s data from API’s and give it a user-friendly makeover.)
- Plugins/Cloud-based stuff
In a lot of cases, the architecture is there for you already. There are open-source projects, guys on YouTube who are hobbyists or fully-fledged commercial architectures available that you can add to as opposed to building from scratch.
The ideas are there and if you want to stand out, you should be looking for them.
Final Thoughts
It’s not what you know. Access to knowledge is pretty universal now. Knowing how to code is something that everybody with YouTube can access. Sure, learning how to code well is a different story… but still, if only 1% of people with access to YouTube have any talent, then that’s a lot of competition.
It’s not who you know. We have Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook as well as a billion different other portal sites. You can get access to anyone if you try hard enough. I’ve emailed directors of massive companies, army generals and celebrities from my laptop in the middle of nowhere, England.
Instead, it’s about what you do with what you know. This doesn’t matter if you’re a super-human tech coder or a contemporary artist. For just about every skill, there is a marketplace of willing buyers and there are applications that can lead to financial success.
Skills can be learned. Knowledge can be gained. Contacts can be made. The application of all of those things together is the skill you need to cultivate, but above all you need to look for the opportunities where nobody else is looking.