Crafting Two Careers: Pursuing Creative Technology & DevSecOps
In this blog I will be covering four different facets of this topic, these will be as listed below:
- Why I Want to Build Two Careers
- Why I Chose DevSecOps
- Perm to Freelance: From Designer to Creative Technologist
- Learning Structure: Skills I Plan on Learning & How I Plan to Learn
Why I Want to Build Two Careers
My desire to build two arguably very different careers spawned due to a number of factors, the main ones being my own incentives and personal goals, the rise of AI (especially in relation to design) and also my own views and experience of the design industry overall.
My own incentives and personal goals include a desire to learn a new skillset, seeking to become more well-rounded and also seeking to become more technical. The goals element of this is largely rooted in seeking to become senior level across more than one discipline as well as my desire to eventually begin building my own products with minimal outsourcing.
In regards to the rise of AI, I am well aware that Product Design (UI Design, UX Design and UX Research) are still a ways away from complete AI automation. Nonetheless, I am eager to future-proof my career sooner rather than later.
My own views and experience of the design industry may or may not be echoed by other designers but what I have noticed so far are the following points:
- A downward trend in UX salaries (in the UK market)
- Design as a discipline being undervalued by many organisations
- Career progression in design being confusing to navigate, in my experience I have been in the odd limbo between mid-weight and senior for a while
- Designers with development skills being of more value to organisations
Why I Chose DevSecOps
I decided to pursue DevSecOps because of a prior interest I had in DevOps, exposure to CyberSecurity and also consuming content online.
I also spoke to a number of SREs and Platform Engineers, did my own research on role responsibilities and skills plus began learning DevOps fundamentals.
Finally, I initially planned on pivoting into UX Engineering but after seeing the saturation of front-end development roles in the UK market as well as what software engineers themselves expressed about the state of the industry I wanted to pursue something more technical and also more niche.
Perm to Freelance: From Designer to Creative Technologist
Long term, I plan on freelancing as a Creative Technologist whilst pursuing permanent opportunities within DevSecOps.
My reasoning for this is the greater flexibility and freedom this will afford me in my creative pursuits as well as being able to work on a wider range of projects. So far my freelance projects have mainly been within Product Design or Graphic Design, I hope to work on more creative coding, 3D Design and Augmented Reality projects in the future so I can utilise all of these skillsets.
Learning Structure: Skills I Plan on Learning & How I Plan to Learn
The main skills I plan on learning for these career moves are full-stack development, 3D Modelling, CyberSecurity and Cloud Engineering.
I will be learning these skills using a project-based approach and will create mini case studies about these projects upon their completion, I’ll also blog about the learning process itself, any challenges I encounter and I’ll be sharing any resources I find helpful. Most of these resources should be free but if any paid resources are helpful to me I will share these but these (should hopefully) all be relatively affordable.
Thank you for reading and please feel free to connect with me on my social media (@zaibuilds on all platforms) if you have any questions, feedback or just want to chat Creative Technology, DevSecOps or anything else.
Much love,
Zai
