Since you're going through this digital literacy course I'm assuming that you have some interest in getting into a tech career in some form or another. One of the most common misconceptions is that people think that the tech careers are pretty much all filled by developers. That is not the case. It is very helpful to have an understanding on programming, coding, and all of the various pieces that make up applications. But there is a vast number of careers and only some of those are related to writing code on a day in, day out basis. In this guide, we're going to walk through eight of the most popular careers in the tech space.

The very first one is to be a developer or a programmer. That's usually the one that most people think is related to a tech career and it is because it is very popular. A developer, programmer, could be somebody that writes back-end algorithms. It could be someone that implements front ends. It could be a full stack developer that builds every kind of application and works at every stage. But whenever it comes to being a developer or some type of programmer you need to be familiar with programming languages. You need to understand how applications work. Then, you need to be able to work in that environment.

The next career is a project manager. A project manager is someone who might have an understanding of coding and development. But they probably are not actually writing code on a day in, day out basis. Instead, they're managing a project. They are working with a team and they are setting the estimations. They are reporting to all the stakeholders. They're ensuring that the project gets built on time and functions properly.

The third career is a product manager. Now, there is some overlap between project managers and product managers. But the key difference is that you can think of product manager almost like the CEO of a specific project. This is something that is very popular and it's a certain methodology that certain companies follow, Facebook being one of the most famous ones. They say that their product managers are the CEOs of those specific set of projects. For example, if someone is a product manager of the Facebook News Feed, it is like they're the CEO of that feature on the application. They're going to coordinate with the advertising team. They're going to work with probably multiple development teams. They're going to ensure that their feature works properly.

The next career is a QA analyst. That stands for quality assurance analyst. This is typically somebody who will work with a development team. They will build out a set of tests and they will constantly check to verify that new features are one, working correctly, but also they're going to make sure that new features don't break old features that were already there in the system. A great example of this would be, and I do this with DevCamp. We actually have a QA team so that when one of the development team members pushes up a new feature, a member of the QA team will go through and they'll make sure that the new feature meets the requirements that it's supposed to do. But then they also go back and they check to make sure that that new feature didn't accidentally break an old piece of functionality because that is a very common issue that can happen. You, as a developer, could be so focused on building out one feature you don't realize that some of the changes you made in the code actually broke something that used to work properly. A QA analyst is someone who verifies, one, the new features are working properly, but also that the system continues to work the way it's supposed to.

The next career is a data analyst. In large organizations, data analysts are usually individuals who have some level of programming expertise. They can perform tasks such as running database SQL queries or they might be able to automate a few tasks by building a Python script or a JavaScript script that can go and pull data off a website, run calculations. The end goal is that a data analyst should be able to take data, so whether it's data from a database or something from a website or anything like that, and they should be able to help the company make decisions based off of that data.

The next career is a software architect or software engineer. Now, this is usually not a career that you would go into right away. Typically, these roles are filled by individuals who were developers for a number of years, worked on many different applications. Then, they take all of that experience and they use that to help lead entire teams. A systems architect, and this is a role that I've filled multiple times, is where they are consulted before a single line of code has been written. They help decide the programming languages that get picked out, the type of database that is used, how the system is going to be deployed, and all of the various pieces that make up a software system. In many cases, this is usually a more senior developer and it's someone who can leverage all of their past experience to help make a efficient system.

The next career is what is called a DevOps engineer. This is short for developer operations. This individual is usually someone who enjoys working with operating systems. They will be the ones that will configure servers that the applications will run on. They'll build out all of the back-end systems and structure. So they're usually going to be the ones that are going to be interacting with the developers quite a bit because they have to know the requirements of the system. They're going to be interacting with the system architect to make sure that whatever the architect laid out is what gets implemented.

The last career we're going to discuss is that of the UI/UX developer. Now, many times this is an individual who doesn't really write code. It would help if they have an understanding on how code works and they have a high-level view for all of those kinds of processes. But, usually, they're going to be the ones that describe the way that a user is going to interact with a system. Many times they can be designers but I don't want you to think that you have to be some type of creative genius in order to be a UI/UX developer. Instead, the best UI/UX devs that I've ever worked with were very detail oriented people. They could take a high-level concept and then they could diagram out all of the ways that a user would interact with a system. They'd help make that process as efficient as possible.