Friends have asked: “How did you get a tech job with no experience in tech?” Usually, they have a younger sibling or cousin looking to make the jump into IT or tech. I made the career switch in my 30s. If I can do it, anyone can.
Table of Contents
The Best Tech Jobs With No Experience Needed
Before career switching, let’s debunk some common myths about getting into tech or IT. Don’t let these stop you.
First, “I have to learn to code before getting a job in tech”.
The truth: In an analysis of over 500,000 roles in technology companies, 30% were technical roles. The rest? Non-technical roles like marketing, business development, sales, etc.1
Of course, technology chops help. If you want to be successful, you should have curiosity about the 1’s and 0’s behind the curtain. But it’s not a rule. When I started, I didn’t know the difference between front-end and back-end, client or server. I learned along the way.
Next, “I need 3-5 years experience to get an entry-level tech job.”
The truth: “X years experience” is a wish-list item, not a hard-fast rule. There are ways to bypass this “rule” with networking, a great interview, and company selection. We’ll cover some of these strategies further in the article.
“I need a Bachelor’s / Master’s degree to apply.”
The truth: Degree requirements are another wish-list item. It’s becoming more common to land a tech job without a degree if you can add value and you’re a good fit for the company. Many of the tech jobs below don’t need a degree.
“I need X certificate or I should build a portfolio first.”
The truth: Every role has some base skills. For example, a content marketer needs to be able to navigate a CMS. As long as you can do the job, a certificate is unnecessary.
Certain roles need certifications, for example, security, hardware networking, and others. Not the case for the roles listed in this article.
I have no certifications and was missing many of the base skills when I started as a product manager. Again, I picked them up as I needed them. The lesson here: habits > skills.
Finally, a portfolio is nice-to-have if someone is evaluating your job application cold. It’s not required, though, and we’ll cover strategies to skirt this completely.
Next, we’ll cover why you might want a tech job, then explore 11 tech jobs that don’t need experience. Finally, we’ll cover strategies to get in front of hiring managers at great technology companies… without spending months upskilling or building a portfolio.
(Already landed your first tech job and looking for your next? Click here for tips on finding your next tech job.)
What are you looking for in a tech job?
Technology companies tend to move fast. There’s more autonomy. More individual ownership. This makes the job feel frantic, even chaotic.
For example, one common problem at technology companies is “whiplash:” getting flung into one initiative this week… Then jerked in the opposite direction the next.
That experience isn’t for everyone. It might feel risky.
It might be right for you if you want to:
- Make money. A role at a tech company can often pay more than a similar role at a non-technical company. This is because a tech company commands a higher valuation multiple, i.e. they’re worth more (on paper).
- Earn prestige. Brand names matter. The right brand name on your LinkedIn profile can unlock certain career doors. It signals to others the scale or type of challenges you faced, and makes getting the next job easier.
- Learn. Speed matters. As mentioned before, technology companies move fast. You’ll solve challenges at a faster rate, meaning you’ll get more reps. The more reps, the more information you process, the faster you’ll learn.
- Solve a problem. If there’s a particular mission you’re passionate about (education, health, climate change) it’s easy to find technology companies targeting that problem. Mission alignment is that much-needed motivation when things get difficult.
11 Tech Jobs You Can Get With No Experience
- Social Media Coordinator or Manager
- Technical Recruiter
- Seo Specialist
- Customer Support Representative
- Customer Success Manager
- Graphic Designer
- Content Marketer
- Web Developer
- Community Manager
- Project Manager
- Digital Marketing Manager
Social Media Coordinator or Manager
Average salary: $52,724/year (Payscale)
Social media coordinators and managers manage the company’s social media presence. That can mean the big four (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter). It also means developing strategy and content for nascent channels like Snap, TikTok, and Pinterest.
You’ll manage the community on each social channel, create assets (words, images, videos), track the performance of your social campaigns, and develop the strategy.
A social media coordinator is an entry-level individual contributor role. A social media manager handles more strategy and has direct reports. If you’re going into this tech job with no experience, you’ll likely start as a social media coordinator.
Another bonus: this role and many others on this list are remote-friendly (check out 20 tips and tools learned from 9+ years of remote work).
Some challenges of this tech job are:
- The 24-7 nature of social media. To avoid burnout, you’ll have to learn to “turn it off” and take breaks from social media.
- The real-time evolution of the channels. Social media platforms, interfaces, and algorithms change often. To keep up your performance, you’ll have to track these changes and your approach to your campaigns.
Technical Recruiter
Average salary: $61,234/year (Payscale)
Hiring is warfare. It’s a battle to attract and retain the best talent. Recruiting is a hard business getting harder, because:
- Resignations in record numbers
- Remote work means anyone can work anywhere
Solving for hiring is much harder than getting code to work or ads to convert. People are unpredictable (who would’ve guessed)! That makes the technical recruiter role more valuable than ever. As a technical recruiter, you’re responsible for managing the talent pipeline fueling the company’s progress and growth. You’ll source, nurture, and close leads. If you’re someone who can close prospects, you’ll prove to be an invaluable asset.
Your tools of the trade: applicant tracking system (ATS), LinkedIn, spreadsheets, and people software like Greenhouse. Most importantly, you should enjoy working with people.
This is a tech job you can land with no experience if you have a natural curiosity, enjoy people, and you’re a salesperson. Your job is selling the company all day long, via text and calls.
A recruiter also needs tough skin. As with any sales role, rejection is part of the job, especially given today’s macro trends. Push past this barrier, join a company you’re excited to sell to others, and you’ll go far.
Seo Specialist
Average salary: $47,484/year (Payscale)
Search engine optimization (SEO) specialists create and design content to earn web traffic from organic search results. You’re trying to systematically improve the content’s position on the search engine results page. This content can be the company site, blog posts, product pages, etc.
In other words: you’re trying to land your company on page one of Google. Then, you’re trying to rank as the first result.
You’ll conduct keyword research, build a keyword strategy, and draft content (articles, images, and videos). You’ll also track the performance of your SEO campaigns.
If you’re going into this tech job with no experience, you’ll likely start as an SEO specialist. Here you’ll hone your skills in the ever-changing landscape of SEO best practices. Specialists then become managers, which includes a significant salary bump (average: $72,594/year).
SEO specialists should know the full stack of SEO tools:
- Keyword research: Ahrefs, Google Campaign Manager
- Execute strategy: HTML and CSS
- Measure performance: Google Analytics
Customer Support Representative
Average salary: $40,000/year (Payscale)
Customer support representatives are a part of most technology companies. Landing a customer support role with no experience is a common path for folks breaking into tech. Companies prefer to train you up on their specific systems and processes, so coming in with a “clean slate” can be an advantage.
In general, you should enjoy talking with others and diffusing situations with upset customers. You’ll provide support to solve customer problems across phone, chat, and/or email. You’ll also improve support systems, tinkering with team playbooks and scripts.
The customer support role is great if you’re looking for a remote job with no experience required. Great companies offer flexible hours, side projects, and role transition plans. For example, HubSpot, is known for promoting customer support reps to customer success managers. Then, from customer success managers to product managers.
But this varies. Not all companies groom their in-house support teams. Some companies require their reps to keep strict schedules, and there’s little room for promotion. Ask directly about schedule expectations, and processes for promotion.
Customer Success Manager
Average salary: $70,278/year (Payscale)
Reducing customer cancellation is a priority for all subscription-based technology companies like Zoom, Slack, and Dropbox. The biggest reason why customers cancel?
They aren’t getting value out of the subscription. Either they never set up the software, or the learning curve made it too difficult to use.
That’s where customer success managers come in.
A customer success manager works directly with clients to:
- Understand their needs
- Onboard them onto your product
- Proactively introduce new features
Most importantly, they get them to become repeat customers.
You’ll train up on the inner workings of your company’s products, so previous tech experience is not always required.
Customer success managers need deep empathy for the customer. You’ll understand what your client is trying to achieve with the product and anticipate their friction points. That means you have great communication skills, over both email/chat and video calls.
You’ll also need strong technical skills. Not only do you understand your own product, but you’ll understand the client’s tech stack. You understand their workflow and can integrate your product into that flow so they get the most value from it.
If you’re a natural detective (inquisitive, empathetic, curious) and you have good technical abilities, a customer success manager is a perfect role for someone looking for a tech job with no experience.
Graphic Designer
Average salary: $47,032/ year (Payscale)
What you’ll do:
A graphic designer uses words, images, and aesthetics to convey what a company or individual represents. You (along with the rest of your team) create the visual assets for the tech company. Visual assets include web graphics, product packaging, social media images, logos, and more.
While you can land this tech job with no experience, you do need to prove your skills. You should be fluent with today’s design tools like Figma, Photoshop, and Canva.
Great graphic designers are also great communicators. It’s your job to align everyone on the vision before you build any visuals.
If you’re starting out as a graphic designer, your goal is to become “T-shaped.” In other words, build skills around one niche first. This can be Facebook Ads, featured blog images, Squarespace pages, etc. Every niche has hundreds of nuances, which change as the platforms change.
Master one channel or class of assets. Then expand to the next. Over time, you’ll gather experience across many channels and design requirements.
Content Marketer
Average salary: $48,533 (Payscale)
What you’ll do
A content marketer executes the company’s content strategy. They develop all forms of content, from social to video to audio. However, typical bread and butter are longer articles and blog posts. There are copywriting elements to content writing, but you’re not just focused on driving readers to a specific action. Instead, the content writer’s goal is to educate, inform, and shape the brand.
A content marketer is still responsible for measuring the return on investment (ROI) of their content. Basic data analysis skills are a big plus.
If you’ve got writing chops, can pitch stories and research, this is a great tech role to land with little to no experience. Stand out from the crowd by writing and managing your own blog. This shows you can come up with article ideas, do research, and publish. Remember that 5 well-written articles are more powerful than 50 poorly written ones.
Other pluses if you’re interested in this role: Knowledge of content management systems (CMS), spreadsheets, and basic SEO.
Web Developer
Average salary: $88,280/year (Payscale)
A web developer improves and maintains the programs that power the websites and web applications we use every day. These programs manage our money, connect us at work, and send dank memes to our friends.
There are two types of developers: frontend (what the user sees) and backend (how the software functions). Your duties are getting new code to work, fixing old code, and getting code to work for more people. Common languages include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, PHP, and Python.
Besides good technical skills, web developers need to be personable. The lone developer solo building a billion-dollar company rarely exists. Instead, you’ll work with many stakeholders, from customer success managers to designers, to build a better product. Great developers can code AND work with a team to solve a customer’s problems.
The best way to get this tech job with no experience is to attend a developer boot camp. You’ll deep dive into the required skills, then get help with work placement.
Community Manager
Average salary: $52,622/year (Payscale)
The very idea of a community manager role is still a nascent one. For example, at Reforge, we called this role program director, not community manager. But the responsibilities are one and the same.
The community manager moderates and organizes the community of a brand or business. The community can live and interact on any channel. The most popular ones are Facebook Groups, Reddit, Whatsapp, Discord, or Telegram. There are also community-specific apps like Circle.
The Community Manager adds and removes people from groups, answers questions, hosts events, and moderates the conversations happening in the community.
This role’s nascency is a double-edged sword. On one hand, there’s no degree or certification, and today’s best practices are more like “best guesses.” On the flip side, that’s why you can land this tech job with no experience.
If you enjoy communicating with others online and you’re passionate about serving your community, this is a great tech job for you.
Project Manager
Average salary: $58,054/year (Payscale)
A project manager on a tech team is the type-A organizer who keeps the trains running across all teams. You work with stakeholders in product, design, engineering, and finance. You develop project plans and unblock issues to accomplish the project goals. Project managers also assign and manage resources to bring projects in on time and on budget.
A great project manager is a Swiss army knife. You can land this tech job with no experience by being a good generalist. This means knowledge of a variety of tech skills, from HTML, CSS, Excel, CMS, and others, depending on the company. You should be proficient at most project management platforms, like Jira, Asana, or Basecamp.
You can take formal courses on project management and pick up certifications. However, the most important skill is leadership by influence. Since you don’t manage any of the stakeholders, it’s not your job to tell them what to do. So you’ll have to influence with a combination of storytelling, data, and personality.
Digital Marketing Manager
Average salary: $69,046/year (Payscale)
A digital marketing manager is like an embedded project manager on the marketing team. Your job is to increase brand awareness and sales via the company’s online presence (website, ads, blog posts, branding, and social media). You’ll coordinate marketing activities and align them with business objectives. Finally, you’ll measure and track analytics to provide updates to the leadership team.
Like the project manager role, you’re a generalist. You’ll need to know the marketer’s stack, from SEO, email marketing, social media, paid acquisition, and A/B testing.
You’re not expected to be an expert in all channels, but ideally, you’re T-shaped (expert at one, knowledgable at most). You understand how the puzzle pieces fit together and can lead your organization to hit your marketing goals.
Ok. You know why a tech job might be right for you, and which roles to look for.
Next: how to connect with great technology companies, and how to stand out to hiring managers, even without experience.
How to find a tech job with no experience
There are 3 things you should do to connect with great technology companies:
- Build your honeypot
- Source open roles
- Reach out directly
Build your honeypot
LinkedIn is the best place to get noticed by recruiters and hiring managers. 95% of recruiters use LinkedIn to find prospects, using tools like LinkedIn Recruiter and LinkedIn Talent Hub to manage their search.2 These platforms use keywords (“web developer”, “graphic designer”, etc.) to find potential candidates.
Most advice tells you to focus on vanity metrics:
- Go get a professional headshot
- Fill in your profile 100%
- Get at least 100 connections
These details are helpful, but 80% of the battle is showing up when recruiters search for you. That means getting your keywords right, then capturing the reader’s attention with the right details. That’s why we call this “building your honeypot.” Use keywords in the following sections:
- Experience
- Summary
- Headline
Experience. A concise, bullet-pointed description of what you did at your previous companies, how you did it, and what results you produced.
At Reforge, I’ve reviewed thousands of LinkedIn profiles. People struggle with describing the results produced. How can you stand out? Focus on the following metrics during your time at the company:
- Ways the company grew
- Outcomes of projects
- Number of users helped
- Number of customers affected
- Revenue generated
Even if you’re applying for a tech job where you don’t have experience, this section is about showing you drive results, regardless of the role.
Summary. Your summary is a distillation of your experience. With your experience fleshed out, the summary is much easier:
- Current or last role
- 3-5 specific skills
- Nuances about your background or what you’re looking for
- Call to action (how people can reach you)
Headline. The headline ties together your experience and your summary. It’s easiest to write this last.
If your goal is a tech job buyout don’t have that experience yet, write “Aspiring name of role”. For example, “Aspiring web developer” or “Aspiring digital marketing manager.”
That’s 80% of the battle. Once you’ve perfected your experience, summary, and headline, here’s a checklist of items to tackle next:
- Profile picture. You don’t need a professional headshot, but it should be a picture of you, with as much as your face as possible.
- Location. Geography is a filter for recruiters. Set the location for where you are or where you want to be.
- Connections. The more 1st degree connections to a specific company, the more you’ll show up in search results. Don’t overthink this too much. Use the Recommended Connections or Import Contacts feature.
- Open for job opportunities. Turn this setting on. Click Me > View Profile > Add profile section > Intro > Looking for job opportunities
Source open roles
Most of the big job boards are a waste of time… IF you are trying to apply through the job board. You’re essentially firing into a resume black hole.
Instead, you’ll use them to learn about open roles. Then you’ll reach out directly to improve your chances of getting in front of the hiring manager. When you’re breaking into tech with little or no experience, take every advantage you can.
Besides the big job boards out there, I’d recommend these smaller ones that are tailored to startup tech companies:
Use these job boards to find 5-10 roles and/or companies you’re excited about.
Reach out directly
Your honeypot is set, but tech roles are competitive. You’re competing with dozens, if not hundreds of other applicants, many of whom do have the experience you lack.
That’s okay. Instead of waiting for recruiters and hiring managers to knock on your door, you’ll go to them.
You’ll focus on two types of direct outreach:
- Warm outreach
- Cold outreach
Warm outreach. You’ll reach out to people you know who work at companies or industries you’re interested in.
Build a list of at least 10 people you can reach out to. These can be 1st degree LinkedIn contacts, family, friends, former colleagues, or alumni.
Next, before you send any emails, do some research on these people. What’s their role? How long have they been at their current company? Do they have kids? What are 1-2 interests of theirs outside of work?
You can find all of this and more e via Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, etc.
Now we’re ready to email them. Here’s an example email you can use.
Hi Jack,
Hope you’re well. I know it’s been a while. How is Sally? How are the kids?
I’m emailing because I’m starting to explore new roles and saw you worked at Company X. There was an open SEO Specialist role I thought would be a great fit (link to the role) and I’d love to learn more about the company.
Do you have 25 minutes to chat this week? I’m available between 12 noon – 4pm ET on Wednesday 2/15. Or if Friday is better, I’m available most of the morning.
Happy to find a more convenient time for you if neither work.
For situations where you don’t want to be as familiar? Use this script. This is written for a LinkedIn direct message but you can adapt it for email, too:
Hi Vinay, hope you’re well. Reaching out bc I read about your recent work @ Company X in TechCrunch.
I’m a Content Markter and saw you were looking to hire for a similar role.
Would you be available for a quick 15-min chat? I’d love to hear more about your experience there.
Cold outreach. You’ll reach out to people you haven’t met before. Cold outreach is scary at first. One of the biggest fears is, “I don’t want to be annoying.”
Remember: if you are genuinely a good fit for their company, you are doing them a huge favor.
You’ll reach out to recruiters and hiring managers. Their job is to literally find people who are good fits for the role and company. They want to do this as fast as possible, then move on. They don’t want to spend days, weeks, or (heaven forbid) months trying to fill a role.
In other words, they want to fill this role more than you do!
Here’s an example script you can use in LinkedIn messages:
Hi Jan,
Hope you’re well. Congrats on the recent promotion!
I’m reaching out because I’m an aspiring customer success manager. Thought this role (short link URL to open role) was exciting and a good fit.
Can we chat for 15 mins? Thx
Notice a few things:
- Show you did (a little) research on them
- Be direct. Tell them exactly why you’re emailing
- Have a clear call to action (CTA). This CTA works because it’s unambiguous what the next step could be
You now have a list of the best tech with no experience needed. Plus, you have the tools I used to career switch in my 30s.
When you’re ready to search for your next role, click here for tips on finding your next tech job.
Sources:
Photo: Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Super Pumped. JGL’s been my man-crush since watching Brick.
4 Comments
Pingback: 10 Remote Jobs With No Experience Required (and How to Land Them)
Pingback: Working Remotely: 20 Tips and Tools Learned From 9+ Years of Remote Work | Christopher Ming Blog
Pingback: The myth of consistency over intensity | Christopher Ming Blog
Pingback: The 1 Question You Should Ask For Big Life Decisions | Christopher Ming Blog