As a linguist who works in tech, I often get asked by other folks with a humanities background how to make the switch. Assuming you’ve done the hard work of figuring out what you really want to do with your humanities degree and the research to set realistic expectations about the tech industry, the question is then how to fill in the inevitable skill set gap and build relevant work experiences. That’s where I believe most of us feel a little too disoriented and where vocational resources out there seem to be lacking.

Many of us consider going back to school, including taking online certifications, and as a result make a medium-term commitment to bridge the natural knowledge gap that ensues from career shifting. Others develop self-initiated projects and/or do internships – and a few also pursue the popular, but competitive (and somewhat expensive) boot camp path, which often promises guaranteed job placement upon completion.

Unless you’re wealthy or can otherwise live off your savings for a good chunk of time, the problem with these approaches is that they ignore the real need most of us have to make a living. Yes, the very material bug vulnerable idealists (ahem, humanists) are not particularly drawn to comes back to bite us in the back during a time when we’re already quite vulnerable doing the Herculean work of reshaping our core professional identities. Most importantly, the said alternatives don’t usually help us gain the kinds of work experiences many recruiters and employers are looking for in a stellar new hire, especially when it comes to non-entry level jobs.

Take my friend, S., for example. They've reported struggling to find a job because of the disparity between their background and professional aspirations.

I feel it is hard for me to find a job because I studied humanities (literature). I want to change my field and work at a tech company, but without educational background or work experience, it’s very hard. I want to be a coder! I learned Java by myself, and some SQL and Python. I think I can pass the Java test at a tech company now, but I got no interviews at all, which makes me feel frustrated. They all ask for computer science majors or related work experience.

Despite having earned a post-graduate degree in literature and done an impressive amount of self-study, S. hasn’t been able to land a single interview yet.

While this is a multi-faceted situation and there are many factors at play here beneath the quoted surface, one obvious issue to me is that S. is trying to go from literature straight to computer science. If you think about this shift from a recruiter or employer perspective, it’s understandable why S. is struggling to pitch her value, especially at a time when most tech companies are laying off employees at concerning rates, which means S. is competing against seasoned candidates with a broader professional repertoire.

For me, the way out of this conundrum is to think about career shifting from an incremental perspective. It would be more reasonable to find something in between language and comp science first, that is, a field that would allow S. to combine their expert language background with their incipient computational skills. With that experience under their belt, it would then be easier to segue into heavier coding jobs, until S. is eventually doing only software development per se, if that’s how they see themselves fulfilled at work.

In fact, I have practiced exactly what I’m preaching here so far in my career. Some of my first non-academic jobs were as a writer, which is an easier transition for someone with a linguistics-related background. Capitalizing on my writing experience, I became an annotator working on data creation and labeling for machine learning projects in tech. The latter opened a computational linguistics door for me that allowed me to work at the intersection of both language annotation and coding. And in my current role, I write even more code and work on annotation projects from a more managerial standpoint.

If you’re trying to shift careers and find yourself struggling with similar challenges, try asking yourself what kind of jump you’re hoping to land. While there’s a place for revolutions even when getting into a new field, incremental changes make more sense from an employer perspective and help you build needed hands-on experience that should at least get you closer to the interview door – without leaving you financially strapped along that long way.