Breaking Into a Technology Career with a Non-Traditional Background

Learn strategies for landing a tech career without a computer science degree, or without prior professional experience.

Do you love technology, but you’re having a hard time turning that passion into a career?

Maybe you’re largely self-taught, or have a non-traditional career path. You’re looking for your dream job online, but you keep running up against requirements for a computer science degree or professional experience you don’t have yet. It may seem like an impossible problem, but it isn’t!

I was a technical hiring manager where I interviewed over 1,000 candidates – and I know what tech employers are really looking for. It’s not just what’s in the listed job requirements. I’ve also attacked this from the other side – I never had a CS degree myself, yet I ended up as a senior manager at Amazon leading a team of 50 engineers, and ultimately as CEO of my own tech company. This course will teach you the secrets of how tech hiring really works, and how you can turn that to your advantage – regardless of your background.

The tenacity and perseverance that drove you to teach yourself the latest technology are exactly what companies need. I’ll show you how to flip your non-traditional career path into an advantage, by stressing the valuable habits and ways of thinking your unconventional path gave you.

This concise course will cover:

• What tech employers really care about (it’s mainly what you can build, and not your background.)
• How to gain the prior experience you need, when you need experience to get a job. It’s not the impossible situation it seems.
• Building your professional network – the connections you make are essential to getting past the gatekeepers to the best tech jobs.
• The essential habits your non-traditional background gave you, and how to build a narrative about their value to prospective employers.
• How to turn your unconventional education or experience to your advantage – you can “think different” from other engineers, and that’s a good thing.

You’ll also get 6 hands-on activities to turn what you learn into action:

• Optimizing your resume or C.V. when you’re largely self-taught
• Identifying projects to build more tech experience you can do on your own
• Identifying organizations and projects that lead to professional networking opportunities
• Articulating your unique and valuable habits in the form of narratives for interviewers
• Preparing stories for behavioral interviews that highlight the strengths of your non-traditional background
• A mock interview with a technical hiring manager

If you’re tired of being held back from an interesting and lucrative career in technology, enroll now. You don’t need to go into debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars and get a PhD in computer science. With just the right strategies from this course, and dose of your own determination, you can start a technology career that will change your life.

This course was created by an experienced human – no generative AI or ChatGPT was used to generate its content.

Course Instructor

Frank Kane Author

Frank spent 9 years at Amazon and IMDb, developing and managing the technology that automatically delivers product and movie recommendations to hundreds of millions of customers, all the time. Frank holds 17 issued patents in the fields of distributed computing, data mining, and machine learning. In 2012, Frank left to start his own successful company, Sundog Software, which focuses on virtual reality environment technology, and teaching others about big data analysis.