The Career Change That Pays Well: Switching to Tech

You wake up and turn off your alarm. It was supposed to sound more pleasant than your previous fire-drill alarm, but the new, saccharine and disingenuous birdsong or pan flutes have instead started reminding you of only one thing: you have to get up and grind again.

This isn’t the way it has to be. No matter where you are in life, you still have career options. A high-stress low-pay career isn’t the end-all and be-all. New career paths are out there.

And if you want to pursue easy career changes that pay well, there’s nothing better than learning the skills that will lead to jobs in tech.

Here’s why.

Tech: the easy career change that pays well

There are two separate elements we’re talking about here:

1. The easiest jobs for career changers to switch to that are
2. Also high-paying. 

Let’s take them one by one, starting with the salary. 

For this, the market research turns up results that are unambiguous. For example, Indeed lists information technology as one of the six highest-paying industries. And the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics lists the median annual wage for tech professions at over six figures. The data just serves to underline what you likely already know:

Then, for the part of the equation about tech being the easiest field to switch into, we can return to the Indeed article. The other high-paying industries listed include healthcare, law, and engineering. In terms of new career paths, switching to one of these professions would likely require a post-doctorate degree. In addition, if you don’t have a bachelor’s degree, getting fully qualified could take nearly a decade.

But for tech, people can merge their existing expertise with fresh tech skills and find new careers fast. Truly, the barrier to entry is much lower. In fact, employers are enthusiastic about hiring non-traditional applicants as long as they have the soft and hard skills that will allow them to thrive. And based on our Outcomes Report, 87% of our grads get jobs within six months of finishing the program. 

Jobs for career changers

So tech is the industry, but how about some new career ideas in more specificity? Well, even within a more focused domain such as software engineering, there are numerous positions you can choose from. For career change jobs that we know for a fact welcome applicants fresh from bootcamps, let’s turn to our grads.

Web Developer

Web developers craft the sites that you interact with every day. Because they shape the design of a site and build its interactive elements, web developers are key to any company that wants to be present online (i.e., basically every company). This position balances a penchant for creativity with hard-nosed know-how. Just take Isabelle Cuisset_{Refashioning a Career with Tech: Isabelle Cuisset’s TripleTen Story} for example.

After a career in fashion, Isabelle found herself wanting to settle down. She’d been living a peripatetic life across Europe, and she wanted a career that would follow her, not the other way around. Then, while crafting a site on WordPress as part of a small fashion project, she got hooked on web development. 

She decided to follow that passion, so she enrolled in TripleTen. At the bootcamp, she acquired the know-how that has enabled her to start her own boutique web design and development studio, isaWabi. While she’s still keeping one foot in the fashion world, she’s actively applying her creativity to web development simply because it moves her.

I'm working part-time in fashion at a director level. And then, the rest of my time—including the weekends because I love it too much—I work on my own business. I build websites for clients. Isabelle Cuisset, TripleTen grad

And Isabelle isn’t the only grad currently employed as a web developer. Numerous other people from diverse backgrounds have made the switch to this profession after going through our Software Engineering Bootcamp.

Data Scientist

If you’ve ever used a music app that had automatic song recommendations or that generated a playlist that seemed perfect for you, you have a data scientist to thank. These professionals take mountains of data, clean it, analyze it, and apply it to generate predictive algorithms. These algorithms can cover everything from music suggestions to environmental modeling to even the sequencing of DNA, RNA, and proteins, as Jordan Wilheim_{Revitalizing a Promising Career: Jordan Wilheim’s TripleTen Story} is now doing. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Jordan had the qualifications you would think would set him up for a great job; he had a bachelor’s and master’s degree in biology. And yet his career had stalled. His degrees and his background as a lab tech weren’t getting him the professional opportunities he was looking for. He realized he needed more knowledge, and after a false start with free online resources, he enrolled in TripleTen.

Following the in-depth Data Science Bootcamp, Jordan got noticed by a genetic testing company. He had been talking with other employers, but of all the jobs, this was the one he wanted most. It combined his bio background with the new data science skills he’d acquired. So, when the hiring manager got in touch, he was elated. 

“It was probably around 10:30 at night. The hiring manager wrote saying they were ready to give me an offer. I was really excited, especially given that we were in the middle of a pandemic and nothing felt really concrete,” he said.

It felt like a huge weight off my shoulders. Jordan Wilheim, TripleTen grad

That was in 2020. He’s been with that company ever since.

Full-Stack Engineer

Typically, web developers like Isabelle focus on the front end. They’re responsible for all the elements you see and interact with — think the buttons you click and the fields you type information into. 

But there’s more to a site, too. There’s the whole back end, which is all about the unseen processes that make a site function as it should. For example, it accesses the servers where data is stored. When you enter in a login and password, back-end programming checks if your credentials are correct by accessing a database. All that happens without you, the end user, needing to see it work.

Both the front end and the back end are known as “stacks.” Hence, someone who can do both front-end and back-end programming is known as a full-stack engineer. These techies do both the artistic work on the front-end and the nuts-and-bolts coding on the back-end to make sure it all works properly.

And this is the career that Jeremy Rivera_{Balancing College, Work, Family, and a Part-Time Bootcamp to Find Tech Success: Jeremy Rivera’s TripleTen Story} landed. As he was finishing up a degree in communications and media, he was simultaneously working in distribution. He realized that he needed a more reliable career — tech seemed like just the thing.

So he enrolled in TripleTen and knuckled down to juggling school, work, and a bootcamp. It paid off. After he finished an externship building the front end for an app, he started applying for jobs. A tax planning, education, and support company found his application interesting, and a new career in tech was set in motion.

I use what I learned at TripleTen every day. TripleTen not only taught me programming but how to think logically about different things. Jeremy Riviera, TripleTen grad

And Jeremy isn’t the only full-stack engineer who made an easy, profitable career pivot to tech — there are many more, including Desiree Bradish_{From Graphic Design to Code Design: Desiree Bradish’s TripleTen Story}.

How much do people in these positions make?

So it’s about time we stopped being coy and just came out with the data about how much people make after graduating from a bootcamp. Great news: Our Outcomes Report has this information, too. Let’s dive in:

There’s more to that data, too. While the salary increase varies profession by profession, there is one overarching stat that deserves mention: the absolute majority of our grads increased their salaries by more than $27,000. And it’s important to also note that these salaries were almost entirely entry-level. That means that this significant increase is just the beginning. In fact, software developer salaries can skyrocket if you specialize, keep finding your niche, and land a job at one of these companies_{The Top 18 Companies That Pay Software Engineers the Most in 2024}.

See if a bootcamp is right for you

But the first thing to do is gain the skills that can launch that career. Whether you’re switching to tech because of an interest in working from home, an urge to find a new rewarding vocation, or just a no-nonsense desire for a reliable well-paid job, we can help you find the right path to pursue. Just take our quick self-assessment quiz_{Quiz: Is a Bootcamp Right For You?} to see if a bootcamp is right for you.