While recruiting IT personnel, I quite often come across resumes of candidates who have changed their industry to IT after working in other industries for some time. According to my subjective feelings, there are from 20% to 30% of such specialists in the labor market in IT. People get an education, often not even a technical one - an economist, accountant, lawyer, HR, and then, having gained work experience in their specialty, they move to IT. Someone stays in the profession, but changes the industry, while someone changes not only the industry, but also the profession.
I decided to do some research. I am interested in the reasons and motivation for moving to IT from other industries. As well as the main difficulties that arise during such a transition, what tools and sources of information are used by those who wish to move to IT for training and self-study. I interviewed 12 people in person and 128 people completed the online survey. The completed questionnaires ceased to arrive and I summed up the results. The survey is mostly open questions, it was important for me how the respondents describe their experience in their own words, and not what ready-made formulations they tend to.
Thank you very much readers who took part in the survey. I am very pleased with your detailed and frank stories.
Below I present the results of the study.
The study involved 140 people.
Audience composition:
Women - 22%.
Men - 78%.
According to the results of the survey, the following IT professions are most popular among specialists who have changed their field of activity to IT:
Developers (did not indicate their specialization) - 50%
Front-end developers - 9%
Back-end developers - 9%
HR - 6%
Project managers - 6%
QA - 6%
Business process analysts - 6%
System administrators - 5%
Technical support - 2%
Sales - 1%
The most popular professions in which women enter:
HR - 35%
Developers (all specializations combined) - 35%
Project managers - 10%
Business process analysts - 10%
QA - 10%
The most popular professions in which men come:
Developers (without specifying specialization) - 48%
Front-end developers - 11%
Back-end developers - 11%
Project managers - 8%
System administrators - 8%
Business process analysts - 5%
QA - 5%
Technical support - 3%
Sales - 1%
Industries that respondents left:
Provision of services (including catering) - 10%
Teaching (schools, universities) - 10%
Mechanical engineering (design engineers) - 9%
B2B sales - 9%
Finance and accounting - 9%
Retail - 8%
Construction - 8%
Power industry - 6%
Logistics and transport - 6%
Electronics and radio engineering (engineers) - 5%
Medicine - 5%
Production (operators, machine operators) - 5%
Journalism, PR, marketing - 5%
The rest (science - physics, chemistry, psychology) - 5%
Was the transition to IT a meaningful decision?
For the majority of respondents, the transition to IT was meaningful and desirable (approximately 85%). They made efforts to acquire the missing knowledge. A small part of them changed the industry, remaining in the profession (HR, project managers). The remaining 15% ended up in IT by accident, without any clearly expressed desire. We just decided to try our hand at a new industry. And someone even realized a childhood dream after receiving a non-IT education at the insistence of relatives.
What attracted you to IT?
The most frequently cited reasons were:
- Opportunity to work remotely and choose where to live.
- Involvement in progress and innovation.
- I like to participate in the creation of something new (creative activity).
- Interesting tasks, the need to constantly learn and develop.
- An environment of smart, creative people.
- Noticeable, greater motivation for IT employees to work compared to production.
- Self-realization. Personal development. Creation. I want to do interesting work with visible benefits and results, and not sell unnecessary things.
- Stable high demand for specialists, many vacancies, confidence in the future, prospects, demand.
- Better working conditions compared to other industries.
- More modern approaches to management, mutual respect.
- Opportunities for salary growth. Higher pay ceilings than other industries.
- I liked doing intellectual work (in science), but there is little money and bureaucracy, the tasks are not particularly relevant.
- The results of your work are easy to see and show to other people.
- There is little bureaucracy and more equal democratic relations in the team, there is no rigid hierarchy.
- Ability to improve English in daily communication.
- Salaries at the start are higher than, for example, those of state employees - teachers and doctors.
- IT specialists are interesting, educated, diversified creative people, cheerful and cheerful. Nice to work with these.
Approximately 25% of respondents pointed to higher salaries, and 15% pointed to a large number of vacancies and faster and easier employment.
Were your expectations met?
63% answered that all their expectations and ideas about the industry were justified.
12% answered that the work in IT has exceeded their expectations and they are absolutely delighted.
22% said that their expectations have not yet been fully met.
3% say that their expectations were not met.
One respondent answered that he regrets working in IT, because his health (vision, musculoskeletal system) has deteriorated during his work and he wants to move to another field of activity.
Fears and arguments "against" the transition to IT?
The main concerns were:
- Non-core education
- Lack of industry knowledge and fear of looking stupid and incompetent.
- Fear of the need to master huge arrays of new information.
- Uncertainty about my level of English, whether I can understand everything correctly and communicate at the level that was required.
- It will be difficult to find the first job.
- What to do if you "do not pull"?
- I was embarrassed by a large amount of conflicting information - someone praises and says that everything is just fabulous in IT, while others argue that this work is for geniuses and sooner or later everyone burns out, falls into depression
- People learn this at the university, but where should I start?
- Drop in income at first and no one knows how long it will last.
- Fear that they will be denied employment due to their middle age and lack of relevant experience.
- Fear of being embarrassed in an interview due to lack of experience.
- Fear of not passing the probationary period and being left without a job and a stable income.
- Rumors about the "toxicity" of colleagues.
- It was dreadful to leave the profession and the industry to which I had devoted more than 7-10 years, in which I gained experience and some kind of career position.
- In contrast to higher wages, gray schemes are often used (not a fully official salary or a contract with an individual entrepreneur).
Approximately 20% of respondents reported that they understood that their income would decrease for an indefinite time and it scared them, but they took the risk. From which I conclude (probably this is a controversial statement) that a significant part of those βthinkingβ about moving to IT do not dare because of the inability to live for a long time with a lower income than they are used to.
Approximately 30% were afraid that they would βnot pullβ a new profession, the acquisition of new knowledge.
20% reported that they had a very strong fear before the first interviews.
15% doubted that they would be able to find a job without experience and at an older age.
What are the main difficulties that arose in connection with the new job?
Here are the most popular options:
- Complexity and doubts in choosing a direction for development - which programming language and stack is more promising, what should you spend your efforts on in the first place?
- It was necessary to learn quickly and master a large amount of new information - concepts and terminology, other work processes.
- In order to master a lot of information in a short time, I combined the development of a new profession with work, I constantly had to strictly prioritize.
- It required self-discipline.
- It was very difficult to start, there was a feeling that you didnβt understand anything at all, I wanted to quit everything.
- It was very difficult because of poor knowledge of English.
- Learn on your own, without a mentor who will chew everything.
- Lack of basic knowledge, algorithms and what students have been taught at the university for 4 years.
- Scarecrow and still causes discomfort, it is impossible to predict the time it will take to solve many problems.
- Change of corporate culture and management style. Instead of authoritarianism - full democracy, but no one canceled responsibility.
- Relatives for a long time did not understand why he left a stable job, but when he began to earn more than before, they understood.
- Unusually hard work of the brain.
- Adaptation in the company and relationships with more experienced colleagues.
- Imposter Syndrome.
- It was difficult at first to live with a reduced income.
- Lots of slang.
- New tools that had to be mastered from scratch.
- Design patterns are very difficult for novice programmers (it is not clear why all this is, but they ask at interviews).
- Distrust on the part of employers and, as a result, difficulties in finding the first job in IT.
Impostor syndrome was mentioned by almost 10% of respondents. I'm not sure that they all understand the term in the same way. The generally accepted understanding is that a person inadequately evaluates his successes and even achieving something with his own work, he thinks that he was just lucky.
What information was used to overcome these difficulties?
60% of those surveyed have tried free online courses.
34% of those surveyed bought online courses. At the same time, they all tried free online courses. Most of them noted that the information in paid courses is non-exclusive and can be obtained in free courses as well. But at the same time, in paid courses, it is often more complete and better organized, structured. In their opinion, a paid course helps to absorb information faster.
Some noted that the progress in the online course and the likelihood of completing it was higher for paid courses (I paid, which means I have to complete the course to the end).
Only 6% of the respondents said that they attended paid offline short-term (1-6 months) training courses with the personal participation of the teacher, attending lectures and practical classes.
The main source of information that everyone uses is articles on the Internet and search. Google dominates as a search engine. It was mentioned in one way or another by more than 50% of the respondents. Nobody mentioned Yandex as a search engine.
For self-learning, the respondents mainly used the following network resources:
- Netology
- Habr
- en.hexlet.io
- Mainit.com
- htmlacademy.ru
- javarush.com
- YouTube
- Coursera (specially note courses from Mail.ru)
- data.stepik.org
- learn.javascript.com
35% of respondents said that at first, despite the embarrassment and hesitation, they asked colleagues for help. Less than 10% of those surveyed noted that colleagues helped them without enthusiasm. And the rest are sure that helping beginners was not a burden for their more experienced colleagues.
Preferences for self-study - video content or articles/books?
Approximately 42% of respondents prefer to read articles and books, while noting that articles contain more up-to-date information, but with the help of books, fundamental knowledge comes in better.
14% prefer to watch and listen to video materials, podcasts.
The remaining 44% - the largest group - perceive both audio-visual content and text well.
Based on these data, I draw the following conclusion (possibly controversial) that people with a more pronounced digital-visual perception predominate in the environment of IT specialists. These are the ones who better understand logical arguments expressed in textual and graphical form.
Attitude towards paid content
Most of the respondents said that paid courses are more useful, but it cannot be argued that this is always achieved through higher quality content. More than once there was a comment that the course was completed completely and to the end due to the fact that it was paid.
It is not possible to accurately calculate the average cost of paid sources of information. Subjectively, it seems to me that this value is about 30-40 tr. ($500). The range of prices named by the respondents was from 300 rubles. up to 100 rubles
6% of respondents bought books (only 6%!). This result surprised me personally. 42% prefer to read, but only 6% have bought books! Apparently, piracy in this area is thriving more and more.
If you work in IT, please vote in the following poll:
Only registered users can participate in the survey. , you are welcome.
I work for an organization that:
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41,0%Develops and sells its own software products (product development)75
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12,6%Develops and sells hardware and software and hardware systems (product development)23
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18,6%Develops custom software and hardware (outsourcing)34
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0,6%Sells software and hardware from other manufacturers (distributor)1
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6,0%Creates complex solutions based on software and hardware from other manufacturers (integrator)11
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1,1%Teaches (educational institutions, courses, schools)2
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5,5%Maintains or provides IT infrastructure as a contractor10
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7,6%I am not directly related to IT, I am engaged in internal automation14
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7,1%I am not directly related to IT, I am engaged in maintenance of IT infrastructure13
183 users voted. 32 users abstained.
Source: habr.com