Featuring Harry Tsang – Solutions Architect at Nexus FrontierTech

Q: I want to make a career transition into the tech field but I do not have any technical skills currently. Do you have any advice for someone who wants to transition into the field?

A: On my personal journey, I started with a bachelor’s in Business and Finance at SMU. During my undergraduate times, I have done internships at major banks, following which my first job was surprisingly Business Development at Oracle. I then moved into technology consulting for banking, subsequently taking up a master’s of IT in Business, Fintech and Analytics at SMU. I furthered my technical knowledge at AI Singapore, and finally landed a position as Solutions Architect at Nexus, of which is a bridge between sales and engineering teams, being the technical expert in the sales cycle while planning tasks needed for engineering.

Advice #1

Do not sell yourself short just because you did not start off with a computer science degree. There is definitely no specific pros and cons to any path that you take. I believe you can learn a lot from different roles and have a multi-disciplinary approach, seeing things from different POVs and having experience in various industries.

Advice #2

Understand your strengths and weaknesses. Domain expertise in any of your previous jobs may come in handy when it comes to designing new solutions for the industries (eg. enterprise software, healthcare, government, e-commerce, fintech), sometimes even more than technical skills. The understanding of such problems, combined with technical skills, can bring tremendous business impact, as compared to someone who may have great technical skills but does not understand the industry’s problems deeply.

Advice #3 

Do not be fixated on a specific job title. During the transition, do spend effort into understanding various tech and tech-adjacent roles, what they do, and think about how your ideal job will look like (How much time do you like to spend with code, with clients, with internal members, project planning, product management etc.) There are many roles that get more glamour such as data scientists, and software engineers, but the lesser-known ones such as data engineers, data analysts, AI product managers, and technical project managers may be some job scopes that can potentially fit you too. Do talk to people in various job scopes to understand further before developing into a specific path.