July 11, 2023

How to Create a Successful Niche in IT

8 min read

We often meet tech professionals who have loads of skills and experience, but who either don’t know how to get where they want to go in their IT career, or who struggle to ‘package up’ what they have to offer in a way that gets them the roles they’re interested in. Without a strategic and planned approach to your career, it’s easy to feel a bit lost and directionless.

So here’s how you can build a niche in the IT industry, harnessing your skills, experiences, and interests to progress your career and get the best income and fulfilment from your work.

1. Build the foundations of your skillset

To create a lasting niche in the IT industry, it’s crucial to begin by building core skills first. The specific foundations will vary depending on your chosen discipline. For example, a developer will need to be proficient in HTML/CSS and other key programming languages, testing, deployment, and so on. A project manager will need to build strong budget and time management skills, an understanding and application of project delivery methodologies, and stakeholder relationship management.

These foundational skills may take 5-10 years to get to a point where you’re able to start to specialise. There’s no hard rule here and everyone’s journey is different. Our advice is to ensure that you’ve reached a level of proficiency that you can apply these skills to any situation successfully. Leaving gaps in the core skills can create blind spots later.

2. Experience different roles and employers

Gaining diverse experience is another cornerstone of a successful IT career in any direction. Whether you’re carving out a niche in a specific area of IT or within a specific industry, there’s tremendous value working in different roles across multiple businesses. By building up this experience, you’ll learn to look at challenges from different angles, experience different cultures and personalities, and gain the ability to understand new businesses faster.

For many specialised IT professionals, short-term contracts may become part of your future career path. By having experience in a number of businesses, you’ll become more adept at applying your skills and adding value quickly to these types of contract jobs.

Taking on different roles has also helped many successful Kiwi IT professionals to become more effective in their niche. One example of this are those who’ve worked in development roles, architecture and people management. Whether they move into a technical role or a people-based one, their spectrum of experience will come in handy; be it applying technical knowledge to better communicate with people as a leader, or people skills to better translate the business’ needs while working as a technical specialist.

Our advice is to consider the long-term benefits of potential roles. Sometimes, the best strategy is to look at roles as critical upskilling opportunities on the road to doing exactly what you want.

3. Get involved in solving operational challenges

IT and business operations are closely linked in this modern era. Technology is looked to as the solution for many challenges, and many leaders in New Zealand bring technology experience to their role. As an IT professional aiming to establish a niche for yourself in the market, we’d suggest actively going beyond the technical element of your role and becoming part of strategic discussions and meetings.

It’s normal for a technical delivery team to focus on the doing rather than the big why questions. If you’re looking to determine a business niche for your IT skills then it will benefit you greatly to be exposed to business challenges and opportunities in your work.

4. Keep your eyes open to market needs

It sounds simple but the value can’t be overstated; stay aware of the things you see and hear in your work. Are there recurring themes you come across in your work that don’t seem to have a (good) solution? The more you practise being receptive to such signs, the more potential opportunities there are for crafting your niche.

Finding a market need doesn’t require you to discover a totally untapped angle. In most cases a niche in the IT sector will be the combining of several skills and an approach that better fits what businesses require.

6. Determine what activities you’re best at (and enjoy most!)

Long term enjoyment and success depends on you reflecting on your own motivation for specific activities. You may have the technical skills to do something well, but have no interest in it. This won’t be sustainable. Instead, we suggest consciously noting down the parts of your work that you love, see the value in and are particularly good at. You might even want to write these down somewhere.

Understanding your own preferences in work is a long process. You may start with a certain picture of your ideal work and find this to be significantly different a few years down the track. If you continue to capture this information whilst you gain invaluable experience, building a clear niche will be easier when it’s time to specialise.

7. Continue to develop your skills

Any IT professional knows that skill development is never finished. The very nature of IT is based around change – meaning everyone needs to keep reading, learning and applying to stay relevant. Even those who’ve carved a successful career in a particular area of IT need to keep their existing skills sharp and acquire new ones at the same time.

Developing skills might be as simple as reading some new information. It could be online training, getting certified, taking a course or experimenting via a personal hobby project. Whatever shape it takes, personal development is an essential part of success.

8. Identify what problems your skills can help to solve

Over time you’ll start to see the impact of the work you do and how it affects the organisations you work in. Through frameworks like project retrospectives you can start to connect the input you contributed to and the output on the business. This might be securing internal systems, speeding up customer engagement processes, creating more efficiency or simply driving revenue growth. Whatever the business impact, you should take the opportunity to learn the effects of your work.

9. Package up your offering with clarity

You’ve got the experience, the skills and the understanding of the value you add. But all of this can’t create a successful niche on its own. It’s your ability to put all of this together into a coherent value proposition to the market. Whether you’re a salaried employee, contractor or business owner, becoming an in-demand specialist in a specific area requires you to communicate your value to anyone who makes decisions.

Are you able to swiftly describe how your skills make a meaningful business impact? Consider putting together a short paragraph that articulates this. You’ll be able to refer to this in your CV, cover letter, conversations, LinkedIn and even website:

What specialist skills do you offer the New Zealand market?
What experience do you have applying these and in what industries?
What measurable business impact have these skills had on previous projects/businesses?
What makes your unique combination of skills and experience preferable to others (point of difference).

10. Proactively build your professional networks

With a clear sense of the niche you have to serve the market, start to build up your professional network with a real sense of purpose. Start by ensuring that your profile on LinkedIn articulates your niche clearly. You may want to review each recent role and make sure it tells an accurate and clear story.

As you understand the types of roles that your work most commonly comes into contact with, or who are the key beneficiaries of your type of work, you can start looking to connect with and have conversations with these people.

Building up a professional network might start online, but it’s the in person conversations that typically provide the most value. Dedicate time to meeting with various people – without the expectation of direct business. As you have more conversations with people in the industry, you’ll find that you get more demand for your services. If not from those you’ve met, it’ll be others who they’ve talked to that are in need of what you offer.

Referrals and word of mouth are precisely why your niche needs to be clearly defined – so that when the problem that you solve arises, there’s no question on who to contact.

11. Consider the longevity of your niche

Niches can run the risk of pigeon-holing IT professionals into one area if care isn’t taken. Typically a specialist area should be broad enough to adapt with new technologies or market needs. For this reason, it’s also important to recognise your soft skills and transferable hard skills, allowing you to continue to have a clear market value, even if some short term upskilling or training is needed to stay relevant.

12. Capture successes and use them to build up to bigger jobs

As you apply your skills during the day-to-day, it’s important to note the impact your work has on your organisation’s success. As your specific approach to solving challenges is applied with positive results, you can leverage this into bigger future opportunities. As time goes on, you may find that your skills aren’t simply what’s in demand, but your unique methodology. Many also further refine their niche by dropping the hands-on delivery aspect and providing value through guidance instead. This approach is great for those looking for less work hours but who still want to add value. And as the stakes become higher with more technology being applied across more organisations, the experienced advisor is only going to become more in demand!

Learn more about New Zealand’s IT industry

If you’re interested in reading more about the tech sector, check out the other articles in our blog where you can find insights about a range of topics including job interviews, CVs and personal skill development.

Explore our available IT roles today

Ready to use all these tips to find the next step in your career? Check out our latest jobs or chat to one of our team today!

Absolute IT

June 15, 2023

What is Data Engineering? Your Path to a Promising Tech Career

7 min read

Behind every successful operation, there are vital roles performed by talented experts, and the tech industry is no exception. In a world of social media, digital marketing, and machine learning, data is the building block of success, and Data Engineers are the builders, crafting the infrastructure that many organisations rely on for their success.

That’s why Data Engineers are in such high demand and why we need more of them here in Aotearoa. Read on to find out more about this critical job, and why it’s such an exciting career opportunity for any IT enthusiast!

So, what is a Data Engineer?

The world is full of data sets, statistics, and research, but in its raw form, this data can be difficult for a business or analyst to make sense of. Or the data might exist, but no one has a way of getting at it. Enter…the Data Engineer.

Data Engineers create, maintain, and optimise the infrastructure needed to convert raw data into a usable format.

They’re the ones who access and collate data from different sources, structure the data, maintain databases and data management systems, and ensure the data provided is accurate and easily accessible. Any organisation that uses any sort of data to make business decisions can benefit from having a Data Engineer.

Take Netflix for example; how would they know which new shows to invest in, without first understanding what type of content audiences like? It all comes back to the data.

Without a Data Engineer and the infrastructure they set up, organisations end up making decisions without having the full story, and this can be detrimental to their customers – or even the organisation or indsutry as a whole – so it’s a pretty important role!

As Netflix’s Data Engineer, Kevin Wylie puts it:

“I want to make the lives of data consumers easier and enable them to be more impactful…through better access to information and insights.”

Top Tip: Connect with Data Engineers and data professionals online – places like Facebook, LinkedIn and Reddit have communities where you can learn more about their real world experiences.

Skills to pay the bills

Now you know what a Data Engineer does, let’s look at what type of skills you might need to become one:

Programming expertise – managing data sets requires understanding and practical use of programming to ensure solutions are configured properly. Some common languages that are applied in this discipline are Python and SQL.
Database design – working with various and possibly unfamiliar sources of data requires skills in handling and optimising this information. A complex or large scale database needs to be built in a way that allows rapid access to data by anyone who needs it.
API and integration skills – Data Engineers spend a lot of time working out the best way to get different systems to talk to each other. Data insights often require taking raw information from many sources and combining them.
Cloud computing – lots of data is migrated to and managed in the cloud, especially in recent years where business continuity was put to the test. A good Data Engineer knows how to get the most out of cloud systems like AWS.
Quality Control – data extracted from different systems often needs fine-tuning and some clean up before it can be reliably used by data scientists and business analysts.
Strategy – while data engineering is highly technical work , Data Engineers still need to understand, apply, and communicate the high level business impact of their efforts.

Top Tip: These are just some of the skills that are often needed, but don’t be discouraged if you don’t meet 100% of the requirements in a job ad; employers may look for soft skills and personality traits instead, and may be willing to train you in any other skill gaps!

A day in the life of a Data Engineer

A data engineer’s role is a real mixed bag. A typical day or week can involve proactive design and building of databases, or configuring data integrations, but a Data Engineer won’t always be doing ‘hands on’ work either.

You may also need to problem solve and respond to issues, as rapidly evolving tech stacks and business needs aren’t always rolled out perfectly. As any experienced IT professional would tell you, putting out a fire is par for the course!

You might be involved with one or more projects at the same time – any organisation going through ‘digital transformation’ will need Data Engineers to support the handling and connectivity of data.

You should expect to work alongside lots of different people, from software engineers and back end developers to front end designers. You could even end up supporting a senior leader. For example, you may be asked a question or presented with a strategic business goal, and tasked with figuring out how to get the best data to help provide a solution or make a decision.

Providing guidance around the implications data can have on decision-making means you’ll become strong at communicating technical knowledge with non-technical people, a skill that can unlock dozens of doors in your tech career.

Top Tip: A Data Engineer’s daily role can vary depending on the employer and project. To get a better sense of what a role would entail, make sure you read the job description carefully, then call and ask the recruiter or manager specifically what the team’s typical day is like, and what the expectations are for the role.

Career progression for Data Engineers

Like many disciplines in IT, the demand for and the still-evolving nature of data engineering means that you can find both junior and senior level roles in this space. If you’re really interested in how data is connected, accessed, and used, but only just starting out your IT career, aim to get into this space soon.

There’s no sign of New Zealand’s data needs slowing down, with many organisations still in a state of transition from traditional, manual methods into the new digital era.

There’s only going to be more roles and demand for data engineering expertise. As far as earning potential and fulfilment, this is a great field to work in.

You may have heard about Data Scientists – those who can interpret data sets and provide forecasting, modelling and other useful functions to the business. While Data Engineers can become Data Scientists, this isn’t necessarily the typical progression. Many Data Engineers are demanding equitable and often higher salaries. Again, the pay and duties will vary between organisations, so we’d suggest following the discipline you’re most passionate about.

Top Tip: Many skills you develop in IT will be highly transferable across the industry, so whether you start in data or work towards it via other roles, take time to identify the relevant skills you bring to each new role.

A better future depends on data

So many big calls are being made by organisations around New Zealand based on data. Given the shortage of data professionals across Aotearoa, the quality of data isn’t always top shelf. Often the better/worse the data served to analysts and decision makers is, the stronger/weaker the outcomes.

In this sense, a Data Engineer is fundamental to an organisation being able to make smart, informed decisions. It’s just one of many reasons why data engineering is such an exciting career path.

Whether it’s improving agricultural systems to enhance economic growth sustainably, identifying ways to better support underprivileged communities, or educating our next generation in a way that secures a happy, healthy New Zealand of tomorrow – data will power a lot of the key decisions made.

Top Tip: Data roles exist across virtually all industries now, so find one you’re passionate about!

Are you our next data hero?

If you love the complexities and detail of data but also enjoy thinking broadly about how technology and information is utilised in an organisation, then you need to explore data engineering as a potential option, whether as a long term career path or an invaluable chapter in your IT story.

Explore our available Data Engineer roles today

Check out our latest Data Engineer jobs or chat to one of our friendly team today.