Breaking into tech in 2025

I wanted to dive into the topic of the tech industry and breaking into it in 2025, and how I would go about it if I started out from scratch again. We’re going to touching on subjects like, where do you start? What languages should you learn? Is AI going to make me redundant?

It’s an industry that is only going to grow

So, let’s adress the elephant in the room that is AI. Is it going to render all technology jobs redundant, especially software engineers? No, I am confident that it won’t, and every expert who is either a data scientist or a researcher, has told me that that is not going to happen. At least not the way we think it will. Now, this is not a video on AI and it’s impact on our jobs and our society, that’s a completely different video. But I highly encourage you to educate yourself, as there are tons of great videos and courses out there to learn not just basics of AI but also how to use it and even build your own AI solutions.

So, now that we’ve adressed that, it is still very much relevant, if not even more relevant to get into the tech industry today. Because as these technological innovations and new solutions come out, our society get’s more and more dependent on technology. And as that happens, the need for knowledgeable experts within the field will only grow, and not just that, but systems and processes for making technology safe for our society at large.

Security and regulation are huge subjects today more than ever, and is a great starting point if you want to get into the industry. But as I said, the need for good technologists will only grow with time, and I think we all as humans will need to become better technologists in general as it becomes more and more an integral part of our daily lives.

So to me, the job security is definitely there for people in tech. But the kinds of jobs that will be more or less secure vary a lot. Engineers, both hardware and software, are definitely going to be needed as we keep developing technology. And so will data scientists. Fields like ethics, regulation and security will only grow more and more as technology becomes a bigger and bigger part of our lives with things like AI and other incredibly smart technologies.

So, where would I get started?

Now this is a broad question that really depends on both your interests, previous experiences and what your current life situation is. If you’re a teenager who’s still in high school and you’re good with computers or just have an interest for programming or tech, you won’t have nearly the same prerequisites as someone who’s worked in a completely different industry for 10 years and has a house and kids.

So depending on your life situation, different paths and ways to get into the industry will suit you differently. That’s not something that I can really say in a video like this that is so generically curated to so many people. So you’ll have to look into whether if you can study for this kind of field, either college or polytechnic, or if you can study in your own free time with online courses and YouTube.

With that said, having a degree, while valuable in itself, is not a necessity in this industry in general. You can get very far by simple showing your work and your skills. What the degree does offer you is more options in terms of job openings, and it does give you a broad foundation to stand on, especially if you study something like Computer Science. But, like I said, you can definitely break into the industry without a specific degree.

But once you have found a few paths that you can take to get in, whether that is a degree, self-studies or a bootcamp, you’ll need to find a “niche”. Or, specifically, what kind of job in the tech industry you are looking to get. The most popular one’s are Software Engineer and Data Scientist. But of course there are a ton of other roles as well in the industry, like Product Owner, Data and Business Analyst, Service Technicians, Site-Reliability Engineers. Since I don’t have the time to get into them all, I’m going to focus on my own role which is software engineer.

Within software engineering, there are a lot of different disciplines and areas of focus. A classic split is between frontend and backend engineers. Frontend engineering is the work of building the interface that the user is exposed to and interacts with. This includes not only frontend development for the web, but also native development for mobile and desktop devices like for iOS, macOS, Windows and Android.

Backend engineers focus on building services and integrations that run on servers, that is services that the customers and or users do use, but not interact with directly. That could be things like payments, identification, search, product and content management services and so on.

So, if you like user interfaces and design, like using really well designed apps and websites, then maybe frontend is a great starting point for you? And if you find data fascinating and the idea of working with servers and systems intriguing, try backend development.

But before you choose any specific field to be the focus of your next 3-5 years of work, start by learning the basics of programming. This is going to be the foundation that you stand on for the foreseeable future of your career. Learning the basics can be done in pretty much any language there is, so you can choose one that is easier to get started with like Python, JavaScript or Ruby. Or, if you want to get into your more niched approach directly, like if you want to build apps for iPhone, pick up Swift and learn the basics of programming with Swift as your programming language.

Use AI, but don’t let AI do everything

It’s quite common to hear the saying “It won’t be AI that replaces you as a software engineer, but the software engineer who uses AI to his/her advantage”. And I do tend to agree with this, as AI is a tool for us to simplify our work and make us more productive in certain aspects.

But, it’s important to know what you are doing. AI has in some ways become the new StackOverflow, which for those of you who never worked in the industry, is the Google for us software engineers and our programming problems. If you ever wanted to solve a problem in programming, that’s where you went to find the solution. Now AI and services like ChatGPT will most likely be the tools people use to answer those same questions.

But what both of these two scenarios, using StackOverflow or using ChatGTP has in common, is that if you simply copy and pasted from them without knowing what the code did, you were doing not yourself a favor, nor the company you work for.

The whole point of the technologist as a role in society becoming more and more important has nothing to do with job demand for simple writing code or solving problems quickly. It’s because we will need people who truly understand how technology works. How all the different products, services and systems that we build and depend on, work. And if we use AI as some software engineers use StackOverflow, to simply copy code and get the job done, without knowing what we’re doing, then you can imagine the kind of issues we’ll have with security and our services not working as expected.

So learning the fundamentals and the theory behind everything you do, while learning to be productive using AI, is what really will make you successful in a career in tech.