Enter IT: My research on moving to IT from other industries

When recruiting IT staff, I quite often find resumes of candidates who have changed the industry to IT, having worked for some time in other industries. According to my subjective feelings, there are 20% to 30% of such specialists in the labor market in IT. People get an education, often not even technical - an economist, accountant, lawyer, HR, and then, having gained work experience in their specialty, they transfer to IT. Someone remains in the profession, but changes the industry, and someone changes not only the industry, but also the profession.

I decided to do some research. I am interested in the reasons and motivation for the transition to IT from other industries. As well as the main difficulties that arise during such a transition, what tools and sources of information are used by those who wish to switch to IT for training and self-training. I interviewed 12 people in person and 128 people went through an online survey. The completed questionnaires stopped coming and I summed up. The survey is mainly open-ended questions, it was important for me how respondents describe their experience in their own words, and not what ready-made formulations they are inclined to.

Poll link

Many thanks to the readers who participated in the survey. I am very pleased with your detailed and frank stories.

Next, I present the results of the study.

The study involved 140 people.

Audience Composition:
Women - 22%.
Men - 78%.

According to the results of the survey, the following IT professions are most popular with specialists who have changed their field of activity to IT:
Developers (did not indicate their specialization) - 50%
Frontend developers - 9%
Backend developers - 9%
HR - 6%
Project managers - 6%
QA - 6%
Business Process Analysts - 6%
System administrators - 5%
Technical support - 2%
Sales - 1%

The most popular professions women enter:
HR - 35%
Developers (all specializations combined) - 35%
Project managers - 10%
Business Process Analysts - 10%
QA - 10%

The most popular professions that men come to:
Developers (without specifying specialization) - 48%
Frontend developers - 11%
Backend developers - 11%
Project managers - 8%
System administrators - 8%
Business Process Analysts - 5%
QA - 5%
Technical support - 3%
Sales - 1%

Industries whose respondents left:
The provision of services (including catering) - 10%
Teaching (schools, universities) - 10%
Mechanical engineering (design engineers) - 9%
B2B sales - 9%
Finance and accounting - 9%
Retail - 8%
Construction - 8%
Electricity - 6%
Logistics and transport - 6%
Electronics and radio engineering (engineers) - 5%
Medicine - 5%
Production (operators, machine tools) - 5%
Journalism, PR, marketing - 5%
The rest (science - physics, chemistry, psychology) - 5%

Was moving to IT a sensible decision?

For the majority of respondents, the transition to IT was meaningful and desirable (approximately 85%). They made efforts to acquire the missing knowledge. A small part of them changed the industry, remaining in the profession (HR, project managers). The remaining 15% ended up in IT by accident, without any clearly expressed desire. We just decided to try our hand at a new industry. And someone even realized a childhood dream after he received a non-IT education at the insistence of relatives.

What attracted you to IT?

The most commonly cited reasons include:

• The ability to work remotely and choose a place of residence.
• Involvement in progress and innovation.
• I like to participate in the creation of something new (creative activity).
• Interesting tasks, the need to constantly learn and develop.
• The environment of smart, creative people.
• Noticeable, greater motivation of IT-employees to work in comparison with production.
• Self-realization. Personal development. Creation. I would like to do interesting work with visible benefits and results, and not to push the unnecessary.
• Stable high demand for specialists, a lot of vacancies, confidence in the future, prospects, demand.
• Better working conditions compared to other industries.
• More modern management approaches, mutual respect.
• Salary growth opportunities. Higher pay ceilings compared to other industries.
• I liked to engage in intellectual work (in science), but there is little money and bureaucracy, the tasks are not very urgent.
• The results of your work are easy to see and show to other people.
• Few bureaucracies and more equal democratic relations in the collective; there is no rigid hierarchy.
• The ability to pump English in daily communication.
• Salaries at the start are higher than, for example, among state employees - teachers and doctors.
• IT-employees are interesting, educated, diversified creative people, cheerful and cheerful. Nice to work with such.

About 25% of respondents indicated higher salaries, and 15% indicated a large number of vacancies and faster and simpler employment.

Did your expectations come true?

63% replied that all their expectations and ideas about the industry were met.
12% said that work in IT exceeded their expectations and they are absolutely delighted.
22% said their expectations have not yet been fully met.
3% say that their expectations were not met.
One respondent replied that he regrets working in IT, as his health (vision, musculoskeletal system) has worsened during his work and he wants to move to another field of activity.

Fears and arguments against moving to IT?

The main concerns were identified:

• Non-core education
• Insufficient knowledge in the industry and fear of looking stupid and incompetent.
• Fear of the need to master huge amounts of new information.
• Uncertainty in my level of the English language, whether I can correctly understand and communicate at the level that was required.
• It will be difficult to find the first job.
• What to do if I don’t pull it?
• I was embarrassed by a large amount of conflicting information - someone praises and says that everything is just fabulous in IT, while others claim that this work is for geniuses and there everything burns out sooner or later, they become depressed
• People learn this at a university, but where do I start?
• The fall in income at first and it is not known how long it will last.
• Fear that they will be denied employment due to their young age and lack of specialized experience.
• Fear of being disgraced at an interview due to lack of experience.
• Fear of not passing the probationary period and being left without work and stable income.
• Rumors of “toxicity” by colleagues.
• It was embarrassing to quit a profession and industry, to which he gave more than 7-10 years, in which he gained experience and some kind of career position.
• In contrast to higher wages, gray schemes are often used (not fully formal RFP or contract with IP).

Approximately 20% of respondents said that they understood that their income would decline for an indefinite time and they were scared, but they took a chance. From which I conclude (probably this is a controversial statement) that a significant part of those “thinking” about moving to IT are not solved because of the inability to live a long time with less income than they are used to.
About 30% were afraid that they would not "pull" a new profession, the acquisition of new knowledge.
20% said they had a very strong fear of the first interviews.
15% doubted that they would be able to find work without experience and at a young age.

The main difficulties that have arisen in connection with the new job?

Here are the most popular options:

• Difficulty and doubts in choosing a direction for development - which programming language and stack are more promising, what is worth the effort in the first place?
• It was necessary to quickly learn and master a large amount of new information - concepts and terminology, other work processes.
• To master a lot of information in little time, I combined the development of a new profession with work, constantly had to be strictly prioritized.
• Self-discipline was required.
• It was very difficult to start, there was a feeling that you don’t understand anything at all, I wanted to quit everything.
• It was very difficult due to poor knowledge of the English language.
• Learn on your own, without a mentor who will chew everything.
• Lack of basic knowledge, algorithms and what students at the university are told for 4 years.
• Scarecrow and still causes discomfort, it is impossible to predict the time it takes to solve many problems.
• Change of corporate culture and management style. Instead of authoritarianism, complete democracy, but no one has canceled the responsibility.
• Relatives for a long time did not understand why he quit stable work, but when he began to earn more than before, they understood.
• Unusually intense brain work.
• Adaptation in the company and relationships with more experienced colleagues.
• Imposter Syndrome.
• It was hard at first to live with diminished income.
• A large number of slang.
• New tools that had to be mastered from scratch.
• Design patterns are very difficult for novice programmers (it’s not clear why all this is needed, but they ask at interviews).
• Distrust on the part of employers and, as a result, difficulties in finding a first job in IT.

Imposter Syndrome was mentioned by almost 10% of respondents. I am not sure that they all equally understand this term. The generally accepted understanding is that a person inadequately evaluates his successes and even achieving something with his work, thinks he was just lucky.

What information was used to overcome these difficulties?

60% of respondents tried free online courses.
34% of respondents bought online courses. However, they all tried and free online courses. Most of them noted that information in paid courses is non-exclusive and can be obtained in free courses. But at the same time in paid courses it is often more complete and better organized, structured. In their opinion, a paid course helps to absorb information faster.
Some noted that the progress in the online course and the likelihood of its completion were higher for paid courses (I paid, which means I must complete the course to the end).

Only 6% of respondents said that they attended paid offline short-term (1-6 months) training courses with the personal participation of a teacher, attending lectures and practical classes.

The main source of information that everyone uses is articles on the Internet and search. Google prevails as a search engine. More than 50% of respondents mentioned him one way or another. Yandex did not mention anyone as a search engine.

For self-study, respondents mainly used the following network resources:

• Netology
• Habr
• en.hexlet.io
• Metainit.com
• htmlacademy.ru
• javarush.ru
• YouTube
• Coursera (courses from Mail.ru are especially noted)
• data.stepik.org
• learn.javascript.ru

35% of respondents said that at first, despite the constraint and uncertainty, they asked for help from colleagues. Less than 10% of the respondents noted that colleagues helped them without enthusiasm. And the rest are sure that helping beginners was not a burden for their more experienced colleagues.

Self-study preferences - video content or articles / books?

Approximately 42% of respondents prefer to read articles and books, while they note that the articles have more up-to-date information, but with the help of books, fundamental knowledge goes better.
14% prefer to watch and listen - video materials, podcasts.
The remaining 44% - the largest group - well perceive both audio-visual content and text.
Based on these data, I draw such a conclusion (perhaps controversial) - among IT-specialists, people with a more pronounced digital-visual perception prevail. These are those who better perceive the logical arguments expressed in textual and graphic form.

Attitude towards paid content

Most respondents said that paid courses are more useful, but it cannot be argued that this is always achieved through better content. More than once there was a comment that the course was completed completely and to the end due to the fact that it was paid.
It is not possible to accurately calculate the average cost of paid sources of information. Subjectively, it seems to me that this value is about 30-40 tr. ($ 500). The range of prices mentioned by the respondents was from 300 rubles. up to 100 000 rub.
6% of respondents bought books (only 6%!). This result personally surprised me. 42% prefer to read, but only 6% bought books! Apparently, piracy in this area is flourishing more and more.

If you work in IT, please vote in the following poll: