Making a Mid-Life Career Transition to Tech in my Mid-40s
I am in the process of transitioning my career to tech in my mid-40s after more than 20 years in finance.
Why would I ever want to do this?
If there is one thing I learned from my first days in B-school, it’s this:
Follow the money!
In other words, in succinct economic terms — go where there is little supply and too much demand — that is where you have a good shot of landing a job and making good pay.
In contrast to the IT profession, finance jobs at the director and VP levels are heavily saturated. Multiple applicants fighting for the a limited number of Director and VP roles at the banks, brokerages and funds.
There are currently close to half a million unfilled tech job postings:
The unemployment rate for tech at 2.2% is half the overall US unemployment rate of 4.8%.
These figures augured well for a switch to tech.
The supply-demand balance in this industry is in your favor.
What area of tech did I choose to target?
Data Analytics
I will tell you why I chose this area as opposed to others.
First of all, I have been working with data my entire career. Furthermore, I have been extracting insights from this data and communicating those insights to clients the whole time.
I was just not doing it in a very technical way, given my experience goes all the way back to the late 90s, when MS office ruled, and everything was done in MS Excel, MS Word and MS PowerPoint, and sometimes Bloomberg.
The finance industry JUST RECENTLY is beginning to look beyond the MS juggernaut, when it comes to data analytics.
So I am moving to where the ball is going, not where it was, or where it is.
