How to become technical & increase your career capital
It's not about programming but about cultivating a state of mind
I’ve created a sub-substack about professional lessons that allowed me to climb the class ladder (interspersed with gender or cultural commentary). If you subscribe to the main, you can opt out by visiting this page and clicking ‘Account Settings.’
This is an odd thing to write for a liberal arts graduate. Still, I want to share this because it’s how I achieved economic mobility and autonomy in my career in a vastly unequal society. I’ve worked not toward a particular goal but toward acquiring valuable skills, which has so far not led me astray.
I’m not advocating studying anything in particular or learning specialized skills. Not everyone should be studying STEM and learning to code. But in our world, all knowledge workers must be exposed to this thinking. It is a frame of mind. It doesn’t hurt to learn specifics, but that matters less than how you think and describe your thinking to others. By doing what I describe below, I became a translator between business and technical teams, which surprisingly proved crucial in finding a rewarding path.
‘Technical’ is used as an adjective to describe skills and jobs and is usually imagined as comprising a set of ‘hard’ skills related to coding. I argue that technical skills can be built by everyone regardless of specialized knowledge because they are a method for solving complex business problems. It shouldn’t be seen as a standalone attribute. Thinking of it this way puts many jobs out of reach of those deemed ‘non-technical’. The only qualification is having a specific type of degree and knowing how to program. I went from ‘non-technical’ to increasingly technical positions because I approached it as a generalist learning a new way to think rather than learning a set of skills. Also, anyone can learn to code, but few people can enhance their technical skills with the communication abilities needed to achieve well-architected systems.
To become qualified for more technical (usually higher-paying) roles, developing a new orientation toward your work and trying different methods to solve novel and challenging problems is essential. However, the more you can apply the principles of logical reasoning to your daily work, the easier it will be to differentiate yourself in the market. The highest-paying remote jobs go to those with these kinds of skills.
The examples below are from my experience acquiring technical skills through various jobs and roles.
Learn complex tools well.
Identify the most difficult tool needed for your job and learn it well enough that others will consider you knowledgeable. Much of career success in the knowledge economy is based on one’s ability to use complex tools efficiently, which will help set you apart from the crowd when applying for jobs that have a technical component but are not seen as STEM jobs.
For example, knowledge of SQL and data structures can set a product manager apart, and the ability to use complex marketing tools can set a marketer apart. I learned many architectural and other technical concepts by translating Salesforce platform functionality for marketers. The more I tried to translate, the better I understood the system's intricacies, which helped me understand how to apply what was possible to the problems in front of me.
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Understand what’s possible with your tools.
More importantly than learning the tools well is learning what you can do with them, both to manipulate data and better integrate systems with business processes. This will free up hours spent on manual labor (often data manipulation) for your team and yourself.
This will save the organization labor costs because outside consultants are often brought in. The more an internal person can guide consultants, the cheaper the overall cost of the system.
In the context of a system like Salesforce, a B2B tool that enables B2C interaction, this means learning how endless features can work together to solve the business problem.
Often, a process involves accounting for the customer’s and the employee's experience using the tool(s) to interact with them. This requires solving problems involving data flows, the internal user’s experience, and the business's end customer.
Ask questions about the data & find stories to tell.
Understand and be able to analyze the data produced in the context of your function. If you’re a marketer like I once was, you are likely swimming in data; some may not yet be useful to your team. To build these skills, begin by understanding all the disparate data sources that affect how you do your job. Ask yourself some basic questions and try to find the answers. You will probably teach yourself some SQL in the process.
For example:
What does each data source tell you about your customers (internal or external)?
How and in which systems do they interact, if at all?
Which questions are being asked today based on the data, and what has not yet been asked? The latter will help you stand out.
A bonus is the ability to diagram the answers to the above, which is an invaluable tool in creating alignment between the business and technical sides of the organization.
Practice systems-oriented thinking
Understand how systems work in your job context and how tools interact to form the whole. If you use one tool, are there other tools that feed it or consume data from it? What happens as a result?
Systems-oriented thinking has allowed me to architect marketing business processes across many tools. Understanding how multiple systems interact and how to extract useful information is one of the most significant opportunities in any organization because the problem is abstract and requires different thinking.
A place for marketers specifically to begin would be to identify the gaps in your marketing architecture where customer data is disjointed. Finding and filling the gaps will help build many analytical & technical skills at once.
For example: What are the holes in the interactions with your customers, say, in a marketing or sales context? In my recent jobs, I’ve had to enable marketing journeys across multiple apps made by different vendors in addition to several Salesforce products. This required identifying where the data does not connect. A helpful place to start exploring is working backward, from which questions cannot be answered with your analytical tools today due to missing or disjointed data.
Become acquainted with how data is structured and where it’s stored
Understanding the connections between types of information is essential to developing technical acumen. Data modeling is not just the provenance of the data architect.
After that, one should be able to determine where new data sources might fit into the existing model, at least defining their relationships. Once I understood data relationships, I could quickly identify the gaps to fill.
Understanding in which systems the data is stored will help to fix a disjointed system. For a marketer, this means identifying where you gather information about a consumer and how these disparate entities relate.
Look for ambiguous problems to solve involving processes and data
Acquiring rare and valuable skills is accelerated when solving the most ambiguous problems. The more complex issues require creativity in multiple domains, making work more exciting and rewarding while exercising your brain, which is essential for mastering any skill.
Learn basic SQL
Understanding at least the basics of query types and joins will not only help you understand the data better, but you will also start to understand the relationships between types of information and intuitively understand where to connect new data to the existing model and what passes through all the systems with which you interact. As a bonus, when you have to talk to software development teams, you’ll be better equipped to speak their language.
In summary, if you want more autonomy and rewards in your career, there are only upsides to exercising your logical reasoning skills and abstract thinking by taking some of the above steps. In my career, I went from recruiter to solution architect over a decade by constantly applying the above advice. One does not have to study STEM fields to have more freedom in one's work. But, if you start with the background, you can work your way into your ideal lifestyle (e.g., I would not be living my perfect life if I had to go to an office, making my technical chops crucial).
Technical skills can also differentiate you from the crowd even if your job is considered non-technical, as they were for me in a marketing role. Finally, I hope this will encourage women in non-technical jobs to develop their skills in these domains as a tool to open more career pathways. The labor market’s valuable skills will always shift, and we must adapt continuously.
Some other observations about work (I’m burned out from two straight weeks of work travel and don’t understand why anyone would want a traveling job):
I’ve experienced asshole behavior perpetrated by men and women, as have most other people. Among women, when speaking about negative workplace experiences, gender is almost always deemed the culprit. And it may be the differentiating factor many times, if not most. But gender and race can’t always explain the negative experience. The other person may be an asshole. Or you might also be an asshole; these things are often not one person’s fault.
If it hasn't already arrived, the gender tipping point is en route. I’ve now worked on mostly majority-female teams. But often, women at work insist men are present to lend gravitas to the situation. This lends credence to the argument that the more women in a profession, the less prestige it is perceived to have, even among women. And so we jostle among each other to compete for and bring men in to elicit agreement between us. Or, in some cases, they probably want the men to tell them what to do. Not sure what to do with that.
Power is an intoxicant; it leads one to assume that everyone is under their sway.
The more ‘prestigious’ a career, the more soul-sucking. But also more renumerating, which buys freedom of choice, is it the illusion of choice?
Women are in a double bind - there are enough people of both sexes who won’t allow meritocratic conditions to exist for women. Only men get to compete truly. Men and women both have endless ways to destroy the women around them - a problem of ethics. I won’t claim that men are never victimized in the workplace, but women are far easier targets in most situations. And it’s because we’re perceived as weak and lacking agency. When I was younger, I didn’t push back often enough when I was treated unfairly, but that has become easier with age. Keep at it, ladies.
This is excellent advice...and it goes the other way, too! My career now is over (I'm retired), but I was in a technical field and had to learn the non-technical skills...effective supervision, managing personality conflict, writing for persuasion rather than just technical conclusion...even project management requires an understanding of team members' strengths and weaknesses (what my outfit called "situational leadership").
Yeah, if you're not in a technical field learn the essentials of the technical; if you're in the technical field learn all you can about the social aspects of team and project management. And apply them.
Your observations about women bringing men into projects is interesting; very often I was brought in to projects to help move them forward when they seemed stalled; this was often at the request of women (my boss was a woman so I never thought of it as a gender thing, though not all the requests came from her). I thought it was an expertise thing, now you've got me re-evaluating those experiences...
I am in the process of a career change, I am going to try and apply these principles.
Have you read 'Class' by Paul Fussell? I have not read it, as it is specific to the US - but looks quite interesting.