Career path choice is not as easy as one may think it is.  Whether you want to specialized as mobile developer, or as web front end engineer, or as DevOps, or dat scientist, or project manager the question that you should start asking yourself is to know those people do. not only that you also need to know why you are choosing that specific career path and what is take to get started.

There are so many ways to build a career in tech. It is true that in most cases when you start looking for your first job, your are clueless about the differences between career paths. But if someone asked you what a site reliability engineer did, you won't probably be able to tell.

 Each role has varying degrees of breadth, depth, and business skills: Being an expert in an area, you should have a depth of knowledge about a specific subject. And it’s often a very tactical or technical type of knowledge. You know how to solve the immediate problem at hand.

Usually, people start their careers by going deep in one area in order to gain depth from their undergraduate schooling or through some experience working in one area. For sure, everyone should have depth in at least one discipline. It keeps you from falling into the trap of becoming a jack of all trades and a master of none.

But to move up, you’ll also need to expand your understanding of your field. For example, if you are a project manager, you would need knowledge of other areas of project management such as branding, agile project or scrum tool and channel management to grow into an expert project manager.

Having a breadth of knowledge means you have an understanding of several different disciplines. You may not have incredible depth in some areas, but you can look at the big picture and understand how each discipline interacts with others and what it means for the company’s long-term success.

To move up in any role, you also need business skills. There is also a sliding scale when it comes to business knowledge. A senior leadership role requires you to be in tune with multiple aspects of the company’s work. Broadly speaking, you’ll be transitioning from a tactical to a strategic business skill set. When you start out with depth in one specific discipline, you likely have tactical business knowledge. 

Do you want to make this tangible, let’s look at common tech roles and what they require.

Join our panelists:

Dr. Kabaore W. Rodrigue, Chair person and Dean of the Burkina Institute of Technology

Mr. Muhammad Auwal Samu, Developer manager at DSC SSA

Mr. Nabole Rachid, IT Manager, Mentor at the DSC BIT