The technology industry, by nature, is fast-paced and is becoming one of the largest global industries for employees. However, what many prospective applicants are unaware of, is that skills learned in previous industries are transferable. The tech industry boasts a diverse range of roles that accommodate a multitude of career backgrounds.
This #TechiesDay (National Techie's Day) we'd like to celebrate the techies (employees in the tech industry) at Trint that work behind the scenes to bring you world-class transcription and time-saving collaboration tools.
Our Trinters have come from a number of different career backgrounds and each individual is proof that you don't need to have tech experience to succeed in this fast paced industry.
Role in Trint: Associate Software Engineer
Time at Trint: 2.5 years
Responsibilities:
Currently, I am building new features for users of our product. However, my time at Trint started in a totally different department. Previously, was a Talent Coordinator and before that, I offered support to all users for product queries, bug reports and admin-related tasks - as a CX (Customer Experience) Specialist.
Transferable skills from a non-tech role to a tech-based one:
Working with customers in CX helped me transition into my recruitment role easily especially during conversations with candidates. I also gained lots of product knowledge from my time in CX!
After some time in CX, I approached our HR department, expressing my interest in moving to the Talent Team. The timing was perfect as there was an open opportunity in the Toronto office. I really enjoyed my time in Talent; it's taught me so many valuable life skills and has been crucial for my personal and professional development.
An opportunity (outside Trint) to do an engineering course presented itself early this year, and a new passion was realized. After discussions with the Engineering Team about my course I was set up on the codebase so I could contribute to product to see if being an engineer was the right fit for me. It was a resounding yes so, together, we came up with a plan for me to move over to the UK (from Canada) to join the Engineering Team once my course was completed, and here I am now!
Role in Trint: Customer support agent
Time at Trint: 2 months
Responsibilities:
Monitoring and taking care of customers. Resolving customer queries. Signing up customers and being the first point of contact for new and existing customers.
Transferable skills from a non-tech industry into the tech industry:
I worked as a customer service specialist in my previous job. It has made my progression at Trint quicker as I had previous knowledge and experience in this field.
What concerns did you have before joining the tech industry:
None. I was excited to work at a start-up and the plenty of new opportunities that I was going to face when I started. At my interview, I was excited about the culture at Trint and couldn't wait to advance my career at Trint.
Role in Trint: Lead Software Engineer
Time at Trint: 6 Months
Responsibilities:
In addition to working on features across the development teams, I spend time guiding improvements in our ways of working and developer experience so that we're constantly decreasing the time it takes for ideas to make it to production. We develop primarily in Typescript/Javascript and are constantly looking for the best way to architect our system. I have always worked in the tech industry and Trint has assisted in my career development.
What concerns did you have before joining:
When choosing somewhere to work my priorities are as much around the culture of the team as the products the company develops, which is something that can be difficult to assess in the space of a few short interviews and conversations with recruitment. What I found when I joined Trint is that there is a high level of enthusiasm and energy for what we do and how we do it, and the culture is incredibly supportive and welcoming.
Role in Trint: Digital Marketing Executive
Time at Trint: 10 months
Responsibilities:
Looking after SEO (search engine optimization), paid marketing including socials and Google ads (SEM), partnerships and affiliates
Transferable skills from a non-tech role into the tech industry:
Moving from the travel industry to Trint was a huge change for me but I found that there were many transferable skills that helped me transition from one industry to another. One of these being project management - this is always relevant no matter the industry or role. I also found that there was a lot of technical language used company-wide that I had not used or heard of before so being able to communicate effectively (especially during my first few months) and asking as many questions as possible helped me get a better grasp of 'how things work' at Trint.
Did you confront any challenges in that move:
Trint has team structures that I wasn't familiar with, so when I first joined I found it difficult to understand different remits under specific job roles and titles. However, after a few weeks of settling in, I understood how this worked for Trint and why it worked for the company too. Again, asking questions is key especially when first joining a company, particularly in the world of tech.
What concerns did you have before joining:
I joined the company during lockdown at the end of 2020 so I was worried about being onboarded completely remotely (I had never worked remotely before, let alone starting at a company and being onboarded remotely). However, there were processes in place to make sure this was done as smoothly as possible. Employees from different teams also reached out frequently for virtual coffee chats which also helped me feel more welcome!
Role in Trint: Head of Data
Time at Trint: 11 months
Responsibilities:
Leading the strategy and implementation of data engineering, data science and data analytics. I have always worked with data in the tech industry so transferring these skills over to Trint was easy.
What concerns did you have before joining:
I'm always curious about leadership's investment in data as an asset and how that leads to an investment in tools and people to create a more mature data-driven organization. a lot of companies say they are invested but some blockers do come up, which can result in compromises being made for the data platform or data team and this can mean being unable to meet the data demands of the business. I'm pleased to report that no such blockers have come up at trint
Trint champions applicants from all career backgrounds. Many skills from other roles are transferable as roles are diverse.
If you'd like to join the team check out our vacancies here.
