WHICH TECH CAREER PATH IS RIGHT FOR ME?

You're weighing your alternatives as you pursue a career in tech. Should you train as a data scientist or a web developer? Maybe UI or UX design would be more appropriate? How about the rapidly expanding industry of digital marketing?

You are attempting to determine which of these very lucrative job options is best for you. They are all in recession-proof industries. You're in the correct place, then!

In this post, we will be focusing on these tech disciplines;

1. UX/UI design

2. Web development (Frontend and Backend)

3. Software Development

4. Data Science

WHAT DOES A UI DESIGNER DO?

Photo credit: Pinterest

The process of creating the appearance, feel, and interactivity of a digital product is known as user interface (UI) design.

You navigate through multiple screens and engage with different aspects when using an app or visiting a website in order to get where you need to go and finish tasks.

A digital user interface's component pieces and each of the screens that make up the interface are both created by UI designers. As a result, they take into account both the general design of each particular screen and the integration of all the other screens.

They want to design user interfaces that look fantastic, accurately represent the brand, and are simple and fun for users to use.

UI designers typically take care of:

📌 Colors and imagery
📌 Typography
📌 Spacing
📌 The visual design, positioning and behavior of UI elements such as buttons, text and form fields, drop-down lists, scrollbars, icons and checkboxes (to name a few)
📌 Animations
📌 Responsive design—ensuring that the design adapts to different devices and screen sizes.

If any of the above mentioned interests you, then UI design could be your preferred career path.

WHAT DOES A UX DESIGNER DO?

Photo credit: Mindinventory

You have a user experience whenever you utilize a product or service. This could involve using a mobile app, looking at a website, interacting with a tangible object (like trying on a new pair of running shoes), or utilizing a service (checking into a hotel or using public transportation for example).

All facets of this contact are referred to as user experience, or UX. Consider the last time you tried a brand-new product. Did you succeed in completing your task? How simple was it? How did it affect how you felt? Easy, efficient, and enjoyable products and services are the goals of UX design.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN UI DESIGN AND UX DESIGN

📌 If you are more of a 'creative' or you are good with aesthetics and colors, you should opt for UI design. And if you are more of a thinker and problem solver, UX design would be the best for you.

WEB DEVELOPMENT (FRONTEND)

A front end developer's primary duty is to make sure that users of the website can easily interact with the page. They accomplish this by combining programming, design, and technology to code a website's aesthetic and take care of debugging. Everything you see, click on, or use when visiting a website is the result of the efforts of a front end developer.

Despite some variations between businesses, you can typically anticipate a front end developer's role to involve some or all of the following:

📌 Optimizing the user experience.
📌 Using HTML, JavaScript and CSS to bring concepts to life.
📌 Developing and maintaining the user interface.
📌 Implementing design on mobile websites.
📌 Creating tools that improve site interaction regardless of the browser.
📌 Managing software workflow.
📌 Following SEO best practices.
📌 Fixing bugs and testing for usability.

WEB DEVELOPMENT (BACKEND)

The professionals that create and manage the systems that allow websites to handle data and carry out operations are known as back-end developers. Back-end developers are involved in server-side tasks that you cannot see, such as data storage and security, in contrast to front-end developers who are in charge of everything you can see on a website.

Working on server-side software, which focuses on everything a website can't show you, is what back-end development entails. Databases, back-end logic, application programming interfaces (APIs), architecture, and servers are the main areas of attention for back-end developers as they ensure the website functions properly. They employ code that assists browsers in interacting with databases, storing, comprehending, and erasing data.

Some common tools for back-end developers include:

🏷 Programming languages:

📌Python
📌PHP
📌JavaScript
📌Ruby
📌Java
📌C#

🏷 Frameworks:

📌Laravel
📌Django
📌Spring
📌Ruby on Rails
📌Meteor
📌Node.js

🏷 Databases:

📌MongoDB
📌MySQL
📌Oracle

🏷 Servers:

📌Apache
📌NGINX
📌Lighttpd
📌Microsoft IIS

Depending on what interests you, you do not need to learn all of these tools and programming languages. You can research on each and find out what would best workout for you. Some people decide to learn both frontend and backend development, these are FULLSTACK DEVELOPERS. That is also a path you could think of in the long run. It involves a combination of both frontend and backend development.

WHAT DO SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS DO?

Building software that satisfies user needs requires the use of programming and design skills by software developers. They typically meet with a client who needs software built before building, testing, and deploying the program in accordance with the instructions they have been given.

Software developers use a variety of technologies and abilities to design, program, create, deploy, and manage software. Additionally, they contribute to the creation of software systems that power devices and networks and maintain the functionality of those systems. Meeting with clients to ascertain the requirements for a software solution may also be part of their job, which will aid in the design of the finished product.

A software developer's activities often involve supervising software programming, testing software during various stages of development, planning software design, creating models or diagrams to illustrate the intended outcome, and planning future software updates.

It's essential for software developers to understand programming languages. The specific languages they need to know will vary depending on the sector they work in and the software they create, but generally speaking they should be familiar with the following languages in addition to any others that may be used as industry standards;

📌 Python
📌Java
📌C#
📌SQL
📌HTML

WHO ARE DATA SCIENTISTS?

An analytics expert known as a "data scientist" is in charge of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data to support organizational decision-making. A mathematician, physicist, statistician, or computer programmer are just a few of the traditional and technical vocations that the data scientist role draws from. It combines the use of scientific ideas with sophisticated analytics methods like machine learning and predictive modeling.

In a broader sense, a data scientist is someone who understands how to evaluate and extract meaning from data, which calls for both human intelligence and tools and techniques from statistics and machine learning. Because data is never clean, she spends a lot of time gathering, cleaning, and munging data. Persistence, statistics, and software engineering abilities are required for this process, as well as those for comprehending data biases and troubleshooting code-generated logging output.

To find out if you would make a good data scientist, ask yourself these questions,

Do you;

📌 hold a degree in mathematics, statistics, computer science, management information systems, or marketing?
📌 have substantial work experience in any of these areas?
📌 have an interest in data collection and analysis?
📌 enjoy individualized work and problem solving?
📌 communicate well both verbally and visually?
📌 want to broaden your skills and take on new challenges?

If you said "yes" to any of these, you might really enjoy the area of data science.

Math or statistics expertise is necessary for data scientists. Along with creativity and critical thinking, it's also crucial to have a natural curiosity. How can you use all this information? What opportunities have you yet to discover? To fully utilize the data, you need to be able to make connections between disparate pieces of information and a drive to look for unanswered questions.

Tech has a lot of paths to be discovered. The ones briefly listed here are just a handful of them. I believe finding one you have a particular interest in would make choosing one much easier for you. Thanks for reading!