IT professions for techies and humanitarian: how a student can choose a specialty based on their interests

Let's look at how to help a teenager find their dream job, what IT specialties are, where to learn more about them and where to start practicing.

All schoolchildren have hobbies and interests. Even if at first glance they do not seem very serious and useful to parents - for example, a child plays video games all weekend or watches videos from bloggers - you can find the key to a future profession in your favorite activity.

Teachers advise not to decide for a teenager which of his interests are serious or frivolous. We talked about this with tutor Natalya Petropavlovskaya, who helps children identify areas of interest and build a future education and career strategy based on them.

She gave some tips on how to help a student explore their interests:

1. Discover interest - a positive emotional process that encourages a person to learn something about an object of interest, to do something with it. You can invite the teenager to make a list of his interests, answering the question “What do you like to do?”, then rank it.
2. 2. Act as a producer of this interest - that is, select resources, places, events and people that will help your child become more knowledgeable and gain experience in a specific activity. For example:
1. Together, watch a video about specialists who work in an area that interests teenagers: for example, they make video games or create neural networks. Try to find their interviews, webinars or master classes on the Internet. Often, open webinars with experts are held by online schools or corporations, and perhaps the expert has a personal blog. Such people will talk about the profession and inspire the child.
2. Encourage your student to write a research paper or essay at school. It can be done as part of lessons in computer science, social studies or another subject. 
   
3. After learning more about the profession, sign up the student for a free course in the specialty or area he or she likes.
   
4. You can attend a summer camp with activities in an area of interest to your child: e-sports, programming, robotics or artificial intelligence. They are paid and free. 
   
3. Help him understand the experience of these tests. Ask your child whether he liked it or not, what new things he learned, whether he would be interested in learning more about professions.
4. If interest has intensified, you can continue to look for similar places, but with the goal of obtaining achievements in these areas. For example, clubs, olympiads, hackathons and more.

According to the tutor, if by the 9th–10th grade a teenager has accumulated experience in various tests made on the basis of his interests, then there may not be any special problems in professional self-determination. All that remains is to select suitable specialties, universities, colleges or courses. The earlier a student begins practice in a particular field, the greater the chance of building a good career.

Of course, not all children are suitable for the IT field. Someone will want to be a lawyer, a dancer, a chef or a hairdresser - that's normal. There are many stories where people first go into a non-digital profession and then become IT specialists. It happens that the experience of the first specialty is then useful in a new field.

In any case, you should choose your future profession out of love, and not out of calculation. After all, it’s easier to become a pro at something you really like.

Information Technology Professions

There are professions in IT with relatively easy entry: you can take online courses for several months and immediately look for a job - for example, this is often considered the specialty of a tester.

It is more difficult to take your first steps in programming or become a researcher. And to master artificial intelligence, robotics or big data analysis, you will most likely need special education - although there are self-taught people in any profession.

We'll tell you about several IT professions, how a student can learn more about them and start mastering them.

Machine learning specialist (ML, machine learning)

Creates artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that can perform various tasks, such as translating a conversation into another language, driving a self-driving car, or recommending news on social networks. To do this, algorithms monitor what you watch and read, who you like, what information you view to the end, what information you immediately close, and so on.

What knowledge and skills does a specialist need:

• Mathematical foundation: algebra and discrete mathematics, statistics and probability theory. You don't have to finish math; the basics are enough to get started. 
• Logical thinking and analytical mind. You need to be able to break a problem down into its component parts and create algorithms that will solve it. We will have to put forward hypotheses and test them. For example, what should an online movie theater recommendation system take into account: reviews, the weather outside the window, world events, or something else? Taking into account all the factors and checking them is painstaking work. 
  
• One or more programming languages: JavaScript, Python, C, C++, Scala or Julia, many frameworks and utilities, in particular SQL.
  
• English language. Needed for programming, development in the profession and communication with colleagues. 

What to study to learn more about the profession:

• The YouTube channel of the «Academy of Artificial Intelligence » talks about technology and its training for schoolchildren.
• Podcast «Unidentified Artificial Intelligence» and many English-language podcasts.
• • Russian-language Telegram channels from professionals and amateurs. 

Where to start practicing:

• Introductory lessons and a course on machine learning with training tasks rom the Academy of Artificial Intelligence for Schoolchildren. Everything here is free and made specifically for schoolchildren. In addition to studies, they hold an Olympiad, which gives the right to preferential admission, an invitation to an internship in the Sber ecosystem in the field of “Machine Learning” and other bonuses.
• Free courses on mathematical statistics: for example, «Fundamentals of Statistics» и «Mathematical Statistics». 
  

Data scientist

An ML specialist creates AI, and a data scientist uses it to analyze big data and build forecasts based on it. For example, data scientists are involved in creating a feed of recommendations on social networks, weather forecasts based on meteorological data, algorithms for calculating traffic jams for a navigator, medical programs for automatic diagnostics, or algorithms that calculate the probability of an insured event.

These specialists work in companies that have many clients: chain stores and marketplaces, banks, IT companies, government agencies and others. It happens that the company does not have a separate machine learning specialist, then his duties are performed by a data scientist. Here's what a work cycle might look like: 

1. 1 A data scientist translates a business problem into a mathematical plane. For example, it is necessary to increase the average time that a person spends on a social network - to do this, improve the recommendation algorithms of the news feed and make it even more interesting. A data scientist understands what data is needed for this, where to get it and how to process it to create a hypothesis that will help solve the problem.
2. 2 Then a study is conducted, the collected data is analyzed and structured.
3. 3 Based on them, a machine learning model is built that will improve the news feed according to the chosen principle.
4. 4 The model is tested on a group of users.
5. 5 The model is handed over to specialists for implementation.

What knowledge and skills are needed:

• Higher mathematics and mathematical statistics.
• The Python programming language is what is most often indicated in advertisements for data scientists, as well as knowledge of special libraries.
• After this, you can study machine learning algorithms.
• Knowledge of technical English will be a bonus and will help you develop faster.

What to study to learn more about the profession:

• The AI Community channel conducts webinars with Russian experts in Data Science; you can find those you like on social networks and subscribe.
• Books and articles , that will help you either dive into the field of data science or develop your skills if you already have them.

Where to start practicing:

• From introductory lessons and courses with training tasks from the Academy of Artificial Intelligence for Schoolchildren.
• Sber conducts online bootcamps on AI - intensive courses where you can improve your skills in the field of artificial intelligence in a couple of months.

Programmer (developer)

There are many directions behind this word. Here are the main ones:

• The front-end developer is responsible for the external side of the site. For example, you go to a bank portal. You see a banner with a description of the deposit, a loan calculator, green buttons and texts in a certain font - everything is clear and beautiful. The beauty was drawn by the designer, and the front-end developer made the site based on its layouts and “brought it to life.”

• A backend developer writes the internal code of a website. Let's say you filled out a loan application and received approval within a minute. Algorithms on the bank's server checked your credit history, looked at how much money was in your account, and made a decision based on all the information. This process was programmed by the backender. Unlike front-end, it works with the “filling” and not with the surface.
• A mobile developer makes applications for mobile devices. iOS and Android have different programming languages, so you need to choose a specialization. Typically, mobile developers need to know the entire cycle of creating an application - from working with databases to buttons on the screen. But in large companies there is a division into front-end and back-end.
• A game developer creates mobile, computer and console games. Writes the code that turns the script, art designs, and voice acting into a game on screen, or creates the game's network infrastructure.
• A software engineer makes calculations and/or writes programs to control various devices: from an aircraft engine control system to a robot vacuum cleaner. If previous professions can be mastered through courses, then you cannot do without a university. For example, to build mathematical models.
• A test engineer is not a programmer, but rather a good springboard to programming. A tester is often considered a profession for beginners: he looks for errors in the operation of websites and applications, describes them and passes them on to developers to fix them. You can get a job like this after taking courses, and then improve your coding skills and become a programmer.

What knowledge and skills are needed:

Each profession has its own characteristics. The frontend often deals with design, while the backend deals with concepts. You should become a software engineer if you love working with devices, and you should become a game developer if you are passionate about games and are ready to implement other people’s ideas.

The general requirements are:

• The desire to spend most of the day in front of a monitor.
• Structural thinking is the ability to restore order and build processes. This helps you write neat code.
• Perseverance and willingness to redo: sometimes a programmer spends most of the day not writing code, but reading what has already been written, testing and editing.
• Willingness to constructive criticism and work in a team.
• Knowledge of one or more programming languages, as well as many utilities. The most popular languages: HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the front end; Python and Java for backend; Java, Swift and Kotlin for mobile development; C# language and Unity game engine.

What to study to learn more about the profession:

• For the query “podcasts and YouTube channels about programming,” a search engine will return many lists. In some places they discuss programming languages and technologies more, in others they discuss work and life. 
• Telegram channels are not only a source of knowledge, but also an excellent way to “feel” the environment: to understand what is happening in the profession, what people are like there and what worries them. 
  
• Rating of programming languages by the number of queries in search engines. Updated every month. 
  

Where to start practicing:

• Search the Internet for free programming lessons or courses for teenagers.
• Perhaps there are free clubs in your city, for example IT-cube.
• Those who have already mastered some tools should participate in competitions, Olympiads and hackathons.;

Roboticist

This is a generalized name for a profession that has many specializations. Some people design robots, others assemble them, others program, test or maintain them. 

The robots themselves are also different: some are engaged in assembling cars and tractors, others greet customers in a store or measure blood pressure in a clinic. Telepresence robots are machines that, using sensors, collect information (sound, video, etc.) remotely from the operator. Some experts believe that the main goal of robotics is to create a prosthesis for the human body, a robotic avatar. According to RoboJobs, there are more than 290 companies in Russia that make various robots for business.

What knowledge and skills are needed:

• One for each specialization. It depends on what you like best: drawing models of robots, understanding microcircuits and mechanisms, or programming machines. You can start by working as a tester.
• The main languages for programming robots: C, C++, assembler, Python and Java. Knowledge of GNU/Linux will be a serious advantage.

What to study to learn more about the profession:

• You can follow the news and get inspired on the PRO Robots YouTube channel, it is run by Russian roboticists.
• And here are channels with free lessons on the topic.

Where to start practicing:

• There are robotics clubs in different cities and online.
• You can become a mechanic or a specialist in the assembly and maintenance of robots after technical school or college. For example, the Postupi Online service shows eight universities with a specialty in robotics. 
  
• Robotics competitions and hackathons can be found on thematic websites and through search engines.

Cyber Security Specialist

Protects the IT infrastructure of companies and states from hacks and malware, fights data leaks, identifies system vulnerabilities and corrects errors, and investigates cyber attacks.

These are all different specializations. For example, an analyst reconstructs the scenario of a cyber attack and looks for vulnerabilities due to which the system could be hacked, writes algorithms that will notice and stop such attacks. An App Security specialist ensures the security of websites, applications and software, an anti-fraud specialist detects fraud in monetary transactions, and a SOC specialist monitors system security around the clock. 

Inside the company, cyber security specialists are divided into red team and blue team: the former study and model cyber attacks, the latter prevent them and look for ways to protect themselves.

What knowledge and skills are needed:

• Depends on the direction. For example, a data encryption specialist needs a mathematical base: probability theory, linear algebra, number theory.
• To protect the network infrastructure - knowledge of network devices and protocols, Windows and Linux operating systems. 
  
• Programming languages such as Python, JavaScript or PHP are useful for everyone. But first of all, those who will protect web services. 
  
• Many special programs - specific for each specialty.
• Soft skills are especially important: the ability to maintain composure in case of problems.

What to study to learn more about the profession:

• A large selection of resources about cybersecurity: channels, chats and podcasts, courses and offline events. 
  

Where to start practicing:

• You can learn a profession at a university or through online courses.
• There are free courses in English on the Internet. For example, a course in Khan Academy or a Harvard course CS50.
• It is useful to subscribe to Telegram channels on the topic, as well as read reports on sites like HackerOne.

Developer of VR/AR - virtual and augmented reality

A special helmet and glasses will help you get into virtual reality, which transport the user to another world through images and sensations. And augmented reality becomes when a piece of the digital is inserted into our world: for example, point your phone at a page of a book and see animation on the screen.

Both technologies are used in games, education, culture, in production for distance learning, repair and control of work, as well as in medicine, trade and real estate.

What knowledge and skills are needed:

• Unity is a development platform.
• C# is a language for developing video games, mobile applications and programs.
• Understand technology: glasses, helmets, etc.

What to study to learn more about the profession:

• The RBC podcast «What has changed» ” talks about various technologies, there is an episode about VR/AR.
• The VR Journal Telegram channel publishes news, interviews with people from the industry and market analysis. They also have a YouTube channel

Where to start practicing:

• You can take the initiative and bring virtual or augmented reality into school lessons - there are many special applications for this.
• There are free applications where you can create augmented reality yourself without programming: for example, Studio, Blippbuilder or PlugXR.
• Training in paid online courses will take about six months.

Game designer

He comes up with the game world, its rules and characters, and also designs the game experience - what emotions the player will experience. This is one of those IT specialties where it is not necessary to have a deep knowledge of mathematics and programming. But you need to play a lot of old and new games, and also monitor events on the market.

What knowledge and skills are needed:

• Come up with a lot of ideas and be able to present them.
• Work with documents - a lot of time is spent on preparing concept and design documents.
• Understand many disciplines, at least basicly. Psychology is to understand the characters and put yourself in the player’s shoes. Graphics - imagine how everything will look. Programming - what to write a specific game in: PHP, ASP.NET, Java, Python or Node.js. Why this particular language, does it have the necessary capabilities, what is the speed of development and other nuances.
• Bringing projects to completion is the most important part of the job. 

What to study to learn more about the profession:

• Look for interviews with game designers - this will help you learn about the profession first-hand. You can look at materials about this profession on thematic sites, for example here and here. 
• «The How Games Are Made» podcast talks about making games to people who are already making them or are just about to make them. 
  

Where to start practicing:

• You can learn game engines on your own: Unity, Unreal Engine, Defold, GameMaker. They have educational materials that will teach your child how to make a game with ready-made patterns. You can independently master game engines: Unity, Unreal Engine, Defold, GameMaker. They have educational materials that will teach your child how to make a game with ready-made patterns.
• There are free introductory courses like XYZ's «Introduction to the Game Industry»You can look for others. There are many free webinars on game development.
• Look for current hackathons - this is a great opportunity to improve from scratch.

UX/UI designer

Designs the structure and appearance of a website or application so that people find it convenient and easy to use.

UX, or user experience, is about convenience. If you go to a website and they ask you to fill out ten fields to register, this is bad UX design. Most likely, you will go to another site where you don’t have to suffer so much.

UI, or user interface, is a combination of colors, fonts, icons and the appearance of buttons. All this also affects the user experience. In addition to the graphical interface, there is also text, voice assistants, and gesture control. A UX/UI designer does all this.

What knowledge and skills are needed:

• Analytics - you will have to study competitors’ products and potential audiences, results. 
• Structural thinking - coming up with scenarios and diagrams of how the user will interact with the product.
• Services for prototyping websites and applications like Figma.
• Adobe design programs: Photoshop, Lightroom, After Effects.
• Fonts, layout principles, web design trends - you need to understand this and know what your competitors are using.

What to study to learn more about the profession:

• A selection selection of Telegram channels about UX/UI design: news, articles, opinions of cool designers, examples of good and terrible design.
• Thematic sites like this one, here you can find not only news, but also free courses. Articles on the topic can also be found in non-core publications, you just need to search.

Where to start practicing:

• It’s worth noticing cool websites and applications - observation is very important for a designer.
• Follow designers who inspire you, like Dribbble or Behance.
• The basics of the profession can be mastered in online courses in a few months. You can look for free ones.

Product Analyst

Helps businesses make data-driven decisions. Unlike a data scientist, he deals not with technical, but with commercial issues. If a bank’s data scientist writes a program that analyzes the client’s solvency, then a business analyst studies loan statistics for the last year and recommends increasing or decreasing the volume of lending.

In an online store, an analyst studies sales data and forecasts demand for the next season. Or he makes a forecast based on a hypothesis: for example, how much will conversion increase if you add a video about it to the product card.

What knowledge and skills are needed:

• Love of searching for patterns and building hypotheses. Huge tables with analyst data should not be intimidating.
• Knowledge of marketing and business metrics.
• SQL is a query language for working with databases.
• Python programming language - for data analysis and forecasting.
• Visualization of research results in special programs like Tableau.

What to study to learn more about the profession:

• There are many articles and interviews on the Internet about how to become a product analyst, for example here and here . You can also watch lectures and webinars on demand on YouTube, and also look for personal stories about entering the profession.

Where to start practicing:

• A selection of Telegram channels where Russian analysts talk about their work.
• Type “business analyst” into the search and you will see courses from large online schools - they may differ in price and duration.

Researcher

Studies the target audience or behavior of the company's customers - this helps to create new or improve existing products.

For example, there are many parents among bank clients. They can be offered a loan. But everyone’s interests are different: some are saving for their child’s education, others want to increase their living space, others dream of leaving the city and teaching their child at home. They have different needs and motives. Here a researcher comes, asks parents various questions or orders a survey from an agency. Then he analyzes the answers, divides people into groups - and then other people come up with an interesting proposal for each.

Researchers also study competitors' products and people's behavior on a website or application in order to improve the interface: add a new button or change the color of an icon, because the old one is not noticed.

What knowledge and skills are needed:

• This is where the humanitarians can shine. The researcher’s work is mainly about communication: interviews, questionnaires, usability testing - when the researcher observes customer behavior in the product interface. Therefore, empathy and interest in people are important.
• Design thinking is a method for solving business problems based on identifying customer needs. Helps to understand the user and find a solution to his problem.
• There is a technical part too. For example, NPS measurements (when people are asked to rate a service or product), various calculations, quantitative research. Basic knowledge of Excel will be helpful.

What to study to learn more about the profession:

• A researcher's job is to study customer behavior, so it is often closely related to UX. The Sber School of Design podcast podcast will tell you what user experience is, how you become a UX researcher, and what the difference is between qualitative and quantitative research.
• Researchers recommend Robert Fitzpatrick's book “Ask Mom.” How to communicate with clients and confirm the correctness of your business idea if everyone around you is lying? And also books by usability and design experts Stephen Krug and Donald Norman.
• Subscribe to Telegram channels about UX, for example UX Horn.
• For those who know English: the website of the consulting company company NN/g — there is a lot of useful materials there.

Where to start practicing:

• The fastest way to gain practical skills is to complete a course at an online school.
• Large companies sometimes offer internships in UX-related professions. This experience is also suitable for those who want to become a researcher.

Product Manager

Manages the creation of a product and the team that makes it: analysts, programmers, designers and others. Brings the product to market and improves it.

For example, a bank decided to make an investment application. To make a quality product, the manager together with the team:

• Analyze the market and look at competitors' applications.
• They study the user experience: who uses such applications, which functions are paramount for these people, and which are less significant.
• They figure out how the product will better solve people’s problems.
• They develop an application, design it, test it and fix bugs.
• They put it in app stores and ensure uninterrupted operation.
• Continuously improve the application. For example, they find out why customers don’t use a certain function much: technical bugs, an incomprehensible interface, high cost, or something else are to blame.

What knowledge and skills are needed:

• CustDev - researching client needs through interviews.
• Data analytics. Knowledge of Excel, SQL, Python, Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrics will be useful.
• Unit economics is a modeling method where the profitability of a business is calculated through the profitability of a unit of goods or one client.
• UX design is understanding how to make a product convenient for people.
• Communication skills with management, team and users, ability to resolve conflicts.
• Development experience: product developers often become former programmers who know how to work with databases and write backend or frontend. Managing a team is one of the career steps.

What to study to learn more about the profession:

• Podcast «Serebryanaya Chpulya» about Agile. How to get to the desired result step by step.
• Youtube channels about IT business: ProductStar, Project Laba, Y Combinator.
• View selections from the products themselves, for example, useful books, blogs, podcasts and even games are collected here

Where to start practicing:

• Try to get a job as an assistant to a manager or product manager - even for a nominal salary or for free. This is the fastest way to gain practice. The easiest way to find such a job is in Telegram chats. Try to get a job as an assistant to a manager or product manager - even for a nominal salary or for free. This is the fastest way to gain practice. The easiest way to find such work is in Telegram chats.
• Go to university to study product management or take an online course.

Project Manager

If the product manager is concerned about how to make a high-quality application, then the project manager makes sure that everyone is comfortable working, the deadlines are not missed, and the team stays within the allocated budget.

The application may turn out to be weak - and this will be the fault of the product. But if it was done on time, the budget was not exceeded, and the team was comfortable, it means that the project coped with the work and formally has nothing to show for it.

In practice, the line between products and projects is often blurred. It’s not enough for a project to simply plan and monitor the execution of tasks; it begins to develop product functions. But in companies where processes are well organized, everyone will be busy with their own business.

Source: ProdactStar

The project has the following responsibilities:

• Communicate with the customer, clarify requirements.
• Understand the concept, goals of the project and how to achieve them.
• Distribute the budget and control expenses.
• Evaluate risks and set priorities.
• Recruit a team, set goals, motivate and resolve conflicts.
• Monitor the work process and compliance with deadlines, evaluate the results.
• Present the results of the work to the customer or management.

What knowledge and skills are needed:

• Planning: develop strategy, assess risks, set priorities and meet deadlines.
• Team and process management. It rarely happens that everything goes according to plan; you need to be able to rebuild and find a solution.
• Communication. For example, getting clear wishes or edits from the customer, motivating the team, resolving disputes, justifying the budget and deadlines, presenting the project.
• Technical skills depending on the project. Usually, a project has enough basics: a basic understanding of programming languages, knowledge of the basics of UX/UI design, and so on.
• Versatile skills: budget allocation, financial accounting, data visualization and document management.

What to study to learn more about the profession:

• As is the case with other specialties, it is worth reading articles on the topic, for example, with project managers’ answers to questions about work, or materials about the features of the profession.
• In the SDCast podcast, developers, researchers, team leads, founders and managers of Russian IT companies talk about their work.
• Look for collections with books, blogs, videos on the topic — something like this.

Where to start practicing:

• Why not do some kind of project within the school? Gathering a team, doing something interesting and giving a presentation will help you practice managing processes.
• If you choose online courses, you should pay attention to those that give you practice on problems of real companies.

What to remember:

1. 1 Any interest of a teenager can be the key to a future profession. It is better not to decide for your child which of his interests are useless, but to help him understand his hobbies, choose a suitable profession and choose his studies.
2. 2 It is worth immersing yourself in the profession gradually. First, watch a video about it and read interviews with those who are already working. Then look for free courses or clubs. Next, take part in hackathons and competitions. If your interest continues, choose serious study.
3. 3 There are many specialties in IT that suit people with different interests. A humanitarian can also become an IT specialist: for example, a researcher, project manager or UX designer.