In recent years, there's been a significant surge in professionals from various fields transitioning to the tech roles, specifically software-related roles. Whether driven by the allure of innovative work, the promise of high salaries, or the desire for more dynamic career opportunities, more people than ever are switching careers.
Transferable skills play a crucial role in creating a successful transition (and ongoing career success). Skills like effective time management, organization, and communication can bridge the gap between your previous experience and the skills a software role demands. Many career switchers focus on highlighting the technical skills they’ve learned as part of their transition, and as a result, many downplay or don’t highlight their transferable skills that make a good engineer great. Here we highlight some of the key transferable skills we think switchers should discuss.
1. Time Management: Maximizing Efficiency
Effective time management is a cornerstone of success in any career, but it's especially critical in a software related role. With its fast-paced environment and the constant influx of new tasks and projects, being able to manage your time efficiently makes the difference between being rated “underperforming” and “ok” or “acceptable” and “exceptional”.
Good time management helps you meet deadlines, reduce stress, and maintain a healthy work-life balance, which is essential for long-term productivity and job satisfaction.
People who are effective time managers can prioritizing their tasks and work, including:
- Identify critical tasks - ones that align with goals and deadlines
- Categorize tasks based on their urgency and importance
- Break down projects into smaller, manageable tasks (to avoid feeling overwhelmed and to be more efficient)
Efficient engineers often use time-blocking techniques - they allocate specific blocks of time for different tasks or types of work, ensuring dedicated, focused periods to high-priority activities without interruptions. Those who are good have understood that the goal is not just to be busy, but to be productive.
2. Organization
Being well-organized is essential for many jobs, and engineering is no exception. The ability to manage your work, tasks, and projects systematically can significantly enhance your efficiency and productivity. Good organizational skills help you keep track of your progress, meet deadlines, and reduce the stress associated with juggling multiple responsibilities. By maintaining a clear structure in your work routine, you can focus more on problem-solving and less on finding misplaced files or figuring out what to do next - put simply, great engineers are well organized.
When it comes to coding projects, documentation, and learning materials, organization keeps teams on track and minimizes time lost to inefficient searching or wayfinding. You might think that consistent naming convention for your files and directories is not a valuable asset, but this is a small but vital part of keeping engineering teams running, functioning, efficient, and longstanding. Yes, version control systems like Git are invaluable, but they are only as good as you make them - which depends on rigor and organization.
It’s hard to be faulted for keeping a well structured, well maintained, and well organized code base; it is easy to be faulted for not doing so. Thus, rigor and organization are fundamental to showing you can be a strong contributor to a team.
3. Project Management
Understanding the fundamentals of project management is crucial for navigating the complex landscape of software projects. Effective project management ensures that projects are completed on time (or as least late as possible), within scope, and to the desired quality standards (or at least enough to launch with acceptable risk). When you understand what it takes and how long it takes to effectively plan, execute, and monitor projects and their progress, while simultaneously managing resources, risks, and stakeholder expectations, you will be a better engineer than your counterpart who doesn’t.
Applying project management principles to both coding projects and career development plans can significantly enhance your productivity and progression as well.
There are numerous tools and platforms commonly used for project management and collaboration by engineers. You should be familiar with these, especially Jira at minimum, and should pick them up quickly if you’ve done project management before:
- Project Management: Trello, Asana, Jira
- Version Control Systems: GitHub, GitLab
- Methodologies: Agile, Scrum
4. Written and Verbal Communication
Effective communication is vital (arguably to any industry) but especially when working in a highly collaborative or high-dependency environment, or when interacting with non-technical teams. Being able to understand others’ points of view and speak their language helps bridge the gap between different departments, fostering better collaboration and more cohesive project outcomes. This skill allows you to translate complex technical jargon into relatable terms, ensuring that everyone involved in a project is on the same page and can contribute effectively.
Good engineers are good communicators - in all directions: with teammates, with their juniors, with their seniors, with their managers, with product managers. This is often one of the skills young engineers struggle with, so if you’re switching careers and this is one of your strengths, use it.
Good communicators benefit from being able to make professional connections more easily, so do things like attend local tech meetups and industry conferences where you can network face-to-face with professionals. Show your ability to communicate during the interview process.
5. Discipline and Persistence
Every engineer has had to learn discipline and become disciplined. And every engineer has had to persist when problems present long and arduous challenges. Not all professions demand the same level of discipline and persistence that software engineering does - not all professions have no choice but to keep racking their brains to find a bug until it is fixed in production!
Engineering managers want to have confidence in their team members, and part of that confidence is knowing that your employees will not give up when there’s something that really needs to be fixed - no matter how difficult the bug or challenge.
Equally, engineering managers want engineers who are disciplined and rigorous, largely because these skills lead to better code, fewer errors, better products, and fewer problems across the board.
Persisting can be tough, and maintaining an attitude of growth helps provide fuel and motivation to keep going. Adopting a growth mindset makes an engineer’s life more enjoyable! Understanding that failure is part of the learning process and an opportunity for growth makes situations that demand persistence more rewarding. For example, if you encounter a bug you can’t solve, view it as a chance to learn rather than a setback. Embrace challenges as opportunities to learn and improve, and seek feedback actively. By viewing obstacles as learning experiences, you can develop resilience and a positive attitude towards continuous learning. This mindset, combined with disciplined practice, will help you grow and succeed in your tech career.
6. Rigor and the Pursuit of Excellence
Rigor is the foundation of excellence in coding practices and problem solving. Upholding standards of rigor means adhering to best practices and industry standards in every aspect of your work. This includes writing clean, efficient code that is well-documented and follows established coding conventions. Rigor also extends to problem-solving, where thorough analysis and methodical approaches are essential for finding optimal solutions. In software projects, rigor involves careful planning, diligent execution, and meticulous attention to detail throughout the development process.
Managers want engineers who are rigorous and who strive for excellence, so showing that these are skills that you already possess will make you a more attractive and reliable candidate.
7. Exploit Your Transferable Skills
Career switchers often have a lot of transferable skills that are highly valued in the engineering profession. Remember that proficiency in "soft" skills is just as vital as technical prowess, and that great engineers undoubtedly have both. Recognizing that effective communication, disciplined practice, and attention to detail are the pillars of success can set you apart in a competitive landscape. Embrace the journey of honing these skills, understanding that they are not merely checkboxes to be ticked off but ongoing pursuits of mastery.
