Ragged Riches

Lately, I’ve been thinking about starting a new business. Or rather, I’ve been thinking about hanging up my writing for a new career. It’s been rough. So, I started to look into social media management for content creators as well as other career change options for content creators.

I began to look into other career change options for people like myself, so of course, I looked at tech. For about 20, maybe 30 years, tech was kind of an “open playing field.” If you could prove your skill or promise, you had a chance at a very lucrative job. At times, you didn’t even need a degree to do it.

Recently, a new hiring trend started to take hold in tech sectors that is starting to change the way that the job sector works. This is something that will affect everyone, especially those in dire need of a career change. Here’s what you need to know.

Tightening Requirements With Mandatory Experience

Yes, yes, we all know that experience seems to be required, even for “entry-level” jobs. It’s been a thing for about 15 years and it’s an excuse for people who don’t want to pay candidates what they’re worth. I mean, legitimate entry-level jobs would allow you to quite literally enter the industry you want to enter with training.

Bad as it is to try to find “entry level” jobs, there’s a new stumbling block that has been cropping up in peoples’ searches: industry-specific experience. For example, if you want a web design job at a healthcare firm, more tech companies are starting to require that you’ve worked in a healthcare web design role before.

As one person said, “If you haven’t gotten industry experience or worked for a competitor, a lot of these companies don’t even consider your experience at all.”

More AI Required, Please!

It should come as no surprise to anyone that AI is starting to become the go-to skill employers want to see. One highly skilled AI prompter can do the work of three “traditional” workers, if not more. There are several specific AI-based skills that people are looking for:

• Zapier automation
• AI blog post and copywriting services
• “Vibe coding”

And of course, you can also get some certifications that deal with AI, such as…

• IBM’s AI Engineering Professional Certificate
• Google’s Machine Learning Crash Course
• DataCamp’s AI Fundamentals Certification
• AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty

You can find a full list of them elsewhere, but that’s for another article. I’m here to explain to people what they need to do in order to find a job(—)should they want to leave content creation for good. I digress. The point here is that tech is not necessarily the fountain of easy open jobs it once was.

Why Is This Happening?

I’ll boil it down to a couple of really major factors, okay?

A Buyer’s Market

Simple: our economy sucks, and more companies are offshoring their tech talent. With more people than ever before fighting over a handful of jobs, employers can remain as picky as ever while paying pennies on the dollar in terms of value. In other words, it’s a buyer’s market. Job applicants are the sellers.

This alone would make most people sweat, but it gets worse.

Un-retirement

It’s important to point out that there’s also another factor hitting the job market. Many people who were once retired are coming out of retirement. This puts new job seekers (Gen Z and Millennials) at a disadvantage because older generations have more experience.

Even if that experience is old, it looks good on the resume. And resumes matter to the HR people who are trying to get the best candidate to cover their asses do the work.

Hyperspecialization

In sociology and economics, hyperspecialization is a term for requiring a large series of incredibly niche skills in order to perform a set of jobs. Almost every industry will end up having specializations the longer the industry is around.

A good example of this can be seen in the medical field. For example, at one point in history, barbers weren’t just for hair. They also would remove teeth, dress wounds, and more. Some even set bones! However, people started to specialize in medical arts around the 18th and 19th centuries.

After a while, you were no longer a barber-surgeon. You either were a barber who cut hair or a surgeon. Surgeons were the ones who would perform tasks, such as setting broken bones or removing infected teeth. Then, tooth removal stopped being a standard “doctor” practice and started being exclusive to dentists.

The specialization kept happening as more information became available. Today, there are dental surgeons, cardio surgeons, as well as surgeons who specialize in tumor removal. If you were to ask a person to go to a barber for a surgical procedure, they’d likely look at you as if you’re crazy. (And rightfully so!)

The tech industry is starting to get to the point of hyperspecialization. It’s no longer enough to be a computer repair guy or a computer programmer. You need to be certified in the right language, you need to know the regulations dealing with data protection for certain industries….it’s a whole thing.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in all industries. Most of us would like to use sites that have HIPAA-compliant medical record holding rather than everything just willy-nilly. Most of us would want to use investing and savings apps that are FTC-compliant.

Here’s How To Stay Ahead Of The Curve

So, now that we know they “why,” we may as well understand the fix for people in need of a job. Here’s my advice as someone who’s watching this happen in real-time…

• Get some certifications in AI if you want to stand out in tech. Everyone is asking for AI, AI, AI.
• Assess how likely it is that you’ll be asked for industry-specific expertise. Graphic designers, copy writers, social media mavens, and UX designers are the ones who are most likely to get hit with this requirement. If that sounds like a rank you wanna join or have joined, you may need to brush up your CV.
• Try to stick to industries where you’ve done tech work in the past. I know, easier said than done, but putting that extra effort into finding job openings in your old industry makes a lot of sense and skyrockets your chances at a callback from a recruiter. So this means, healthcare works within healthcare, luxury marketers work with luxury marketers, etc, etc.
• If you see a job that you really want a shot at, maximize your portfolio to chase that job. For tech workers who are at a higher risk of the “industry only” stigma, this can mean making “dummy” pages for luxury markets or making a dummy account for a fake doctor’s office. In other words, you need to just show that you get the marketing you’re trying to offer.
• Tweak your resume for the field. Have a small line there, somewhere, that mentions the industries that you’re used to working in. If you don’t have any industry experience officially, use your imagination to parlay some of the other skills you have into experience of that role.
• Network, network, network. I shouldn’t have to mention this repeatedly, but yes, networking is the smartest thing you can do.