Closing Advice

There’s no one “right” tech career choice. In tech, college dropouts with little formal education have gone on to run multibillion-dollar, world-changing companies. Students from coding bootcamps work alongside PhDs. Those who’ve started out in a field like data science have found themselves jumping mid-career into pioneering AI work.

Whatever skills you master will have use in multiple areas; virtually all industries, from aerospace to agriculture, rely on some combination of hardware and software. If you master machine learning and AI, for example, you could land a job doing anything from refining self-driving cars to helping build models for smarter crop rotation.

Like the tech industry itself, tech careers are constantly evolving. The important thing is to never remain static: By constantly evolving and learning, you can stay current in your skills. And evolution doesn’t just mean skills; revisit the most important goals you’ve set for yourself (and importantly, why they matter to you) as often as you can. Life events can change your ambitions, and moving up in organizations can offer more insight into what you want (and don’t want) to do. By constantly evolving, you’ll also remain comfortably ahead of the automation and AI that could have a major impact on the tech industry over the next several years and decades.

Because tech changes so rapidly, your objectives may change as well. In this way, you make your career about you, the person who matters most in any career conversation, and you give yourself a real chance to build the tech career of your dreams.