If you are a teen and you are interested in a career in tech, then read this

This read is for teenagers who have an interest in starting a tech career. The road is quite long and I think to be able to properly navigate the path you need to be well informed.

Tech skills are one of the most in-demand job skills in the world, cos it's the skill of the future. It's skills that solve tomorrow's problem today, tech never runs out of date. So having an interest in a career path in tech is something you should be proud of because, somewhere its shows that you are thinking of how to make the society better by leveraging technology not just for today, but for tomorrow.

Here are some things I think you should know or already be doing to give a headstart on the path;

First, Get a role model. A role model is someone you look up to. Someone already established in a career you see yourself in the future. Do you know why it's important and why I listed it first? That is because that model of yours is like a reflection of what you want to be and maybe even what you would be tomorrow and it's easy to learn from their own experience to be able to create a pathway to achieving your own career goal. This is extremely important because if there's no one you are looking up to, nothing you are holding on to, you can end up chasing shadows the whole time and even get discouraged by any little challenge, so get a role model.

Second, align your educational path with your future tech career goal. Currently, there are a lot of self-taught techies on board, basically, people who studied non-tech related fields in school and had to learn tech skills themselves either on Udemy, Coursera or Youtube. While there's nothing wrong to be self-taught, I mean, it's easier dragging a degree in software engineering with a career in robotics than trying to put law and robotics together if you get what I mean. Besides, they're major roles that will require you to have a degree in a computer-related field before you are even permitted to attempt shooting a shot on the role. So get a computer-related degree.

Third, be ready to drill deep into specialty, or should I say be prepared to do business where the ocean tides are higher. I will explain, this one is sensitive. Remember I said earlier the road is long. One big mistake a lot of people make in tech is that they want to reap the reward of tech very quickly, they want to make tech money, get famous as a guru, and start speaking, soon after they just started learning. One risk of this is that it deprived you of the space and focus you desperately need to become a specialist in a particular field. It's easy to get carried away without realizing there's a lot more to learn. So why specialists will build technologies, fast runners will leverage those technologies, while specialists will for instance, create a language or build a package that complements a language, fast runners will be LIMITED to the use of already built languages. Another disadvantage of not taking your time to learn is that whatever skill they have is very shallow, hence, they're not able to reap the real dividends of tech and again because tech is a very dynamic industry ever-changing their skill set gets easily outdated. [I don't know why I called this set of people fast runners, Usain Bolt was pretty fast sha]

Fourth, start building your ideal persona in yourself. There's nothing wrong in seeing yourself as a brand at the age of 15, it rather boosts your public image and gives you a headstart in the job market. So, get your social media handles set up, write a clear bio on yourself, get a portfolio website, and build projects that showcase your skills at a tremendous level. Don't build anyhow projects just for the sake of stuffing your portfolio, rather build projects that make people agree your skills are divine. When you start pushing yourself to the brim those projects will come out. Three very detailed projects are better than having a truckload of hastily put-together works. Do you why know this point is important, aside from the fact that if it weren't, I wouldn't write it, another major reason is that, the persona you build for yourself coupled with the projects is what takes you to your career goal. So have a good public projection of yourselves and build products that back that projection.

Finally, network. Everybody loves networking! Whether introvert or extrovert get to meet people that align with your career aspirations. Do you know why? People are the keys to opportunities. But you know what you shouldn't do? Never see or use people just as bait or stepping stones to your lofty ambitions. Trust me when I say it will crash when it matters the most. When networking, don't just look for already established personas trust your instinct to be able to build fruitful partnerships with people that have great potential. Message people, attend tech events, try out things and just have fun all through.

Note that throughout this long work I gave myself, I never said to figure out your tech career whether you want to be a Software Engineer, DevOps, Product Designer, Data analyst, etc This is because thinking you can figure out your preferred career at a very early stage is very trivial, so don't bother limiting yourself, be open and dynamic, flow with the tide but be very conscious of your destination. If at 15 you started learning AI/ML but soon realize Data is the way for you, be very open to a change. I know of someone who ended a very comfortable career in Law at the age of 28 for a career in Artificial Intelligence. I mean, what matters is being in a career that makes you happy, right? [and you can pay bills too. Someone said I should add that]

They're many other things I could have said, like don't be afraid of making mistakes, be daring and a lot more, but the read is becoming too long, so I'll end here.