Non-Coding Tech jobs that pay high

Hey friends! Welcome to the Blog. In today's blog, we'll talk about how to enter the tech industry without learning how to code and become a programmer. There is this huge fallacy that in order to break into tech one of the prerequisite is to become a programmer.

So, in this blog post, we will break that myth and will go over two high paying non-coding jobs in tech, the qualifications and backgrounds required for each of these and my tips on how to break into that role.

So, before we get started on the first role, I’m going to compare it to as if we were building a dream house for a wealthy client and outsourcing it all.

Role 1: Product Manager:

In the context of building a dream house, we need someone to own the vision to understand what our client's dream house is. To make high impression choices throughout the project in property development you might call this person the “lead architect.”

Similarly in the world of tech, if we needed to, for example, build a banking app we would need the services of a “product manager” to help us in the following:

·                     Shape the vision of the app.

·                     Build out a list of value-adding features also known as a roadmap.

·                     Assist with the placement of the app on the market.

·                     Acts on our behalf as the main stakeholder of the project.

What are the duties and who should do this job?

The vast majority of product managers don't have any programming background and actually tend to come from either research, I.T or even business and design background.

Qualities required for this job:

Because this is a role that is truly in the intersection of business, engineering and design, in my opinion, this is best suited for someone who is a natural born problem solver, is creative and has a good eye for design and a business acumen.

What is meant by having a business acumen is that you have to be able to prioritize and make decisions that work for the business you work for. Most often than not these decisions will have a dollar value assigned to it.

If this is something that you're looking to explore get yourself a scrum product owner or agile product manager certificate, it will definitely help with the job hunt.

Role 2: Project Manager:

Now that we have a product manager to own the vision of the new banking app, we need to have someone to help us stay on top of three things; the time, the cost and the deliverables or in other words how long will everything from planning to design to coding to launch take.

But also, what will it cost us both for my materials; cost of goods and cost of the team on the ground? In the context of building a property you need concrete, wood, cement, steel, bricks from a pure material perspective. Also, you would need people on the ground like builders, electric engineers, painters, interior designers and so on.

Also, we need to stay on top of the agreed deliverables and manage any risks that derail us from delivering these. Just like in property development, in software and tech, every team is likely to need a “project manager” or also sometimes referred to as a delivery manager.

Duties of a Project Manager:

To be accountable and oversee the time cost and deliverables of the project, the project manager helps the team to stay on track of the agreed budget plan, major milestones, manage things like expenses, manage third party supplier relations and most importantly set the team up for success from a project management process perspective.

Who should do this job?

This role would suit someone who's a great communicator, is good with managing people timelines and budgets but also someone who's naturally organized. So, if you've been praised for your digital savviness your skill to work well with people and staying organized, maybe you should look into becoming a project manager.

Role 3: UX Researcher:

What is a UX researcher?

In order to make data-driven or data-informed choices when it comes to building this new banking app with all its new features and the roadmap, we should be relying on the services of a researcher. A researcher helps the product manager and the team with data to prevent making subjective non-value-adding decisions, like; designing and structuring features that no one wants or that no one is going to use.

Duties of a UX Researcher:

In order to stay as objective as possible, UX researchers collect both quantitative and qualitative data and they feed that back to the product manager and the team in order to support updating their strategy. So, for qualitative research, they might be doing activities like; doing competitive research, conducting one-to-one user interviews, focus groups and so on. For quantitative research which is equally as insightful if our banking app is already on the market and has been used as a researcher, you'd be looking at user data to determine, where users are dropping off, how easy are they finding the navigation and also to use the data to uncover usability issues anywhere within the banking app.

Who should choose this?

This is best suited if you generally enjoy doing research, human psychology uncovering insights and you have an analytical mind. if this is up to your street I would pick up a book called UX research practical techniques for better products.

Role 4: UX Designer:

What is a UX designer?

Have you ever used a site or app and whilst it looked pretty good it was a nightmare to actually use it? The navigation was tough and the interface wasn't intuitive at all. There is a saying in the industry which is that if you need to teach people how to use your app, then you've already over-complicated. The best apps and websites are the ones that are easy and intuitive to use. This is where a UX designer turn out to be valuable.

Duties of a UX designer:

A UX designer is accountable to ensure that what we design and build is useful usable and valuable. The importance of a great user experience also extends to products and tools we use in our everyday lives. UX designers don't design the actual final interfaces, instead, UX designers produce things like storyboards, customer journey maps, wireframes, sitemaps, which are all useful activities and tools to help imagine the user's activities and environment in order to design for their difficulties and desires in a way that is intuitive.

Who should choose this?

So, if you think UX is something exciting I would start by refining myself on Nielsen Norman group principles and articles on UX it's a great resource platform with lots of free content.

Role 5: UI Designer:

That the UX designer has carefully laid out the experience of the new future in detail. It's now time to build beautiful and usable looking visuals, mock-ups and interactions. In a world of property development, this would be the role of an interior designer. One of the biggest misconceptions of a UI designer is confusing it with a graphic designer.

Duties of a UI Designer:

Just because someone is really great at photoshop and is able to design striking logos and banners, designing an IOS or android app takes an entirely unlike skill set.

On one hand, you're designing a banner or logo that's meant to be just looked at with zero interactions and on the other hand, you design an app that's designed for a thumb, that is meant to be allowing people to use a complex user flow. Certainly, it benefits if you have a background in graphic design.

Who should choose this?

One of the best ways to break into the industry as a UI designer is to pick up tools like Figma or sketch and start designing apps and websites in public and share your work with the world and keep an eye out on junior UI designer spots.

Role 6: Software Business Analyst:

Duties of a Software Business Analyst:

Business analysis is one of the key roles in tech as they help the team in two main ways;

        I.            They work with the designers and translate all the agreed user experience flows, diagrams and user interfaces into a set of very clear requirements that the coders can pick up and implement. when it comes to multifaceted software development it's very vital to communicate evidently and to ensure seamless handovers between the design phase and the coding phase.

     II.            The next way business analysts aid the squad is that in some situations there might be glitches that we can't solve in our own in-house engineering team. And we want to look somewhere else like, for example, third-party tools. A business analyst can help us with those problems too.

Who should choose this?

This role would ideally suit someone who's quite digitally savvy and has a I.T background without knowing anything about coding. Again, most peers, I know, don't know how to code, but you should familiarize yourself with some business analyst best practices.

Role 7: Quality Assurance Tester:

All right so now that we have, the product manager, who has strategically prioritized the next few features of the banking app based on data that was supplied by the UX researcher, a boundless design that was interpreted into a set of clear requirements by a business analyst that then went on to be coded by the programmers we're now one step away from launch.

Duties of a Quality Assurance Tester:

But before we can launch, we need to test if everything works as expected. Also, to stress test the system on how it would cope under extreme circumstances and see if things are breaking. To do that we can employ the skills of a quality assurance engineer who is someone that tests the app on different platforms devices, screen sizes, browsers and so on. They give the product manager and the team the green light to launch the next version of the app.

Who should choose this?

If you're the type of person to be noticing small mistakes and issues, when you're browsing the internet and using your favourite apps, perhaps you should look into becoming a quality assurance tester. I would begin by trying to become certified as a software quality assurance tester.

Conclusion:

As a bottom line, being a programmer is of course a top priority thing. But if you are not a programmer you can still have an impact worth equivalent to a programmer in the tech industry. In other words, there are still other services that a programmer cannot do and needs someone to assist to get to the top.

I’ll link everything I mentioned in this blog post at the end. Alright friends, so in this blog post, I could only go over each role at a very high level. If there's one particular role you want me to cover in a bit more detail, do let me know in the comments below and I’ll reply to you. I hope this was useful and I’ll catch you in the next one.

Mentioned links:

Product Manager training & certificates:  https://www.scaledagile.com/certifica...

Project Manager training & certificates: https://apmg-international.com/produc...

UX researcher training & certificates: https://www.nngroup.com/courses/topic...

UX designer training & certificates: https://www.nngroup.com/courses/topic...

UI designer training & certificates: https://www.uxdesigninstitute.com/cou...

Software Business Analyst training & certificates: https://businessanalysisexperts.com

Quality Assurance Tester Training & Certificates: https://www.softwarecertifications.or....or...