How do Internet newcomers choose careers, industries, and companies (Part 1)

How should new Internet professionals choose positions, industries, and companies? This article starts with professional learning, explains how to choose a career, and introduces and analyzes various careers from multiple angles. Finally, it briefly lists how some careers choose industries. Let's take a look.

In the first 5 to 10 years of the Internet industry, students who have just entered the workplace can still change positions or industries. As you get older, industry positions will become more and more stable. In the end, you will continue to accumulate in a fixed industry. There are also some super cows who cross industries and positions, which is another matter. After the epidemic is over, it will be the interview season. Whether you are a novice or an Internet person with less than 10 years of experience, let’s talk about how to choose positions, industries, and companies.

1. New students in school should learn their major well. What you learn is useful.

Many college students who have just entered the workplace will worry about their poor academic performance, but there is no need to worry. Most positions in the Internet industry do not have corresponding subjects . Except for a few colleges and universities that offer product design and human-computer interaction courses, most colleges and universities do not offer these courses.

1) The advantage is that everyone seems to be standing at the same starting line.

2) But everyone is not standing on the same starting line, because basic subjects determine your subsequent development.

1. Learn the major well and lay a solid foundation

I graduated with a degree in computer science, but to be honest I did not study hard enough in college. To paraphrase a line from Infernal Affairs, sooner or later you will pay for what you have done.

One of the most serious problems with Chinese university education is that the workplace and education environment are seriously disconnected. That is, university professors only teach, and they don’t tell you what the things are useful for. In particular, even if you do an internship, you may not be able to get in touch with the core production and research and development links. Then it is easy to fail to understand the meaning of learning. Most people are driven by interests, and there is no motivation without value.

I have to say in advance that the fact that university basic knowledge is not often used does not mean it is useless. The most likely reason is that your company does not have such complexity and does not need these theories.

So let me talk about the subject content to focus on, taking my computer science as an example:

1) Discrete mathematics and linear algebra are helpful for you to have a deep understanding of databases and algorithms.

2) Advanced mathematics and probability statistics can help you make data calculations. For example, if you calculate friend invitations, you can calculate the number of users through viral coefficients, transmission cycles, etc.

3) Database. Needless to say, even if you don’t do development, if you can use SQL to directly retrieve data from the data warehouse, it will blind the interviewer’s core dog eyes.

4) Programming language. Learning it well will help you quickly learn other languages, because object-oriented programming and the underlying thinking of calling numerical values ​​are similar.

5) Algorithms, which help you understand the principles of the entire program implementation.

Students who are not computer science students should not think that their subject is useless for job hunting. A good academic performance score is also a highlight in front of the interviewer, and it is a competitive advantage, which is always better than failing a course and making people feel unreliable. The underlying basis of any study is difficult theory. Learning any subject well will help you quickly understand other subjects. Whether it is marketing or business administration, you will find that what you have learned is useful after you join the job. In particular, many positions in the Internet require compound knowledge talents, and there are always some knowledge Internet jobs that can be used.

2. Newcomers should first understand the profession and then choose a profession

The main thing here is to avoid doing what you love, because loving what you do will make you lose your rationality and judgment. The second is to suggest that whether you are an Internet person who has just entered the workplace or a college student who has not yet entered the workplace, you should first have a rational understanding of the career you are going to engage in.

1. Have a rational "portrait" of the career you like

It is very important to have a clear understanding of the profession when choosing one. The workplace and the education environment are seriously out of touch.

Therefore, it is easy for college students to take things for granted when filling out their applications and choosing their careers.

Let me give you an example. A relative came to me and said her child applied for the college entrance examination. She said she liked human resources and asked me if it was okay. I briefly communicated with her and asked her why she applied for human resources. She replied that she watched "God of Promotion" and felt that human resources was very good. I said it was a movie. In real human resources, you have to screen hundreds of resumes every day and then make phone calls to invite people. The person who answers the phone often hangs up on you rudely. If the company wants to fire someone, you have to communicate and face their roar. Can you bear it?

Is it different from the "Go Lala Promotion" you watched? As for the employee training or team building in Go Lala, such good things basically won't happen to you. First of all, this example is real, although a bit extreme. Secondly, I have communicated with many newcomers who joined the product industry, and the general reaction is that they see the product position has a halo, high salary, and no need to learn code. Or they say that this is a communication position, but it is not the case at all. After entering the industry, I found that it is an industry that emphasizes logic, analysis, meticulousness, heavy workload, and low entry salary.

If we choose the wrong major when filling out the application form, we should not choose the wrong career again after graduating from university four years later. To make the right choice, we must see a career clearly.

2. How to see a career clearly

Therefore, I suggest that most students who want to enter the Internet circle should first understand the real status of the position you want to work in.

1) The best solution is to try to get an internship while in school , but not all newcomers can find good internship opportunities during college. One thing that needs to be emphasized here is that most newcomers have student syndrome, for example, I am willing to learn, but you still don’t hire me. But most companies actually hire people to help them make money. So you must have the right attitude towards internships. Only with the right attitude can you get internship opportunities. Secondly, as long as your financial conditions allow, give priority to opportunities in large companies that match your target career.

Don’t just sit there for fun during your internship. You should really participate in frontline work, even if the workload is huge. Try to get to know your colleagues around you. Keep in touch after the internship. After all, people in the workplace can help you with advice.

2) Participate in activities organized by Internet practitioners, get to know some Internet workers, and discuss how they work.

3) Participate in training courses run by professionals . The head teachers of such training courses are usually part-timers from Internet companies. Many people think part-time jobs are bad, but it is not the case. It is not recommended that you go to those pure training institutions. Most of their lecturers are out of the front line. Most lecturers are eliminated from front-line jobs. This is determined by the market economy. Talents go to where there is more money.

4) Go to Zhihu to read descriptions of related Internet jobs, or go to Zaixing to talk to people. You must have a rational understanding of this profession. There is a "portrait" of people at different professional levels, but don't take it for granted. Although young people have plenty of time, careless behavior is also a waste of time.

3. Most Internet professionals start out with very boring jobs

Therefore, it is very important to see each position clearly. Just as I understood what this job was before I became a product manager, I was not tired of doing the boring things that many product managers don't like, such as drawing prototypes, checking bugs, and practicing pixel eyes. I remember someone said: young people in the workplace are work dogs, which is really good. Because there is no experience, only time, then there is only work. For example, when I first entered the workplace, I basically worked overtime every day in a startup company. I worked overtime on Saturdays and only had one day off.

Whether you can survive the novice period depends mainly on whether you have passion. Product manager is a job with relatively low entry level, so the entry salary is low and the success rate is also low. Only when you enter the senior level will the salary be high because of scarcity. The same is true for operations, the data will be better. So to judge whether you are suitable for an industry, it mainly depends on your concentration. For example, for me, I can calm down for basic work. I am actually a "hyperactive" extrovert. But I can sit still when drawing prototypes or thinking about products. For me, who has ADHD, there was a situation where I sat at my workstation all day to draw prototypes, so that my direct supervisor asked me to take a break, and this also made the senior product next to the workstation mistakenly think that I was an interaction designer. This is not to say that product managers draw interactive prototypes, but that you have to be able to concentrate on basic work and survive the basic work. The better the foundation, the smoother the future will be.

If you haven't entered the workplace yet, you can learn some knowledge about the Internet industry, product operation data design interaction, and see which one you can stay in. If you find it painful to learn advanced mathematics and physics, and you still find it painful to learn workplace knowledge, maybe you just don't like this industry.

3. Introduction to Internet Occupations

First of all, we will not talk about R&D and testing here. Let's talk about non-development positions. Then the main positions are as follows: product, product operation, operation, user growth, interaction design, visual designer

1. Understand careers from the essence of business

If a company provides valuable services, then it should receive a certain amount of income from it, otherwise the service cannot be maintained. Occupations come from the provision of enterprises, and the essence of enterprises is to provide services to make money. So which profession can make money in the enterprise is the most "valuable".

Just look at this picture and you will understand which industry has a "money" future. From the company's perspective, there are three types of people:

1) People who formulate business rules. They are responsible for formulating transaction models, profit models, moats, and the entire product system including the business chain and the company's organizational structure. The so-called products in a narrow sense, that is, the APP and PC we see, are just the online version of this part.

2) From business strategy docking to follow-up to development and launch. We call them business production departments.

3) Sales: Company employees who sell products to customers.

However, from the perspective of consumers, many forms of the Internet sell products directly online, so there is no traditional sales. This part is sold through automation, so many sales tasks are on operations. Therefore, we can classify business model formulation and high-end operations into revenue-generating departments.

We can distinguish from the value of the company, who can provide income for the company, who has the highest income, so the person who makes the business rules has the highest income, and secondly, see who is closer to the business realization. In other words, the more vague and scattered the problem you face, the greater your value. So compared with sales or high-level product operations, junior and middle-level product operations are far away from the business. Compared with junior and middle-level product operations, junior finance, administration, human resources, and front desk are far away from the business. All positions in a company are to make the company run normally. But the value generated varies greatly. Many product operations grow and think that they can control the product and it is valuable. This is an illusion. In essence, high value is whether you can set goals, develop small business models, and mobilize resources, so that you are closest to the core business.

Advanced Internet Functions

I didn't write down who does this job. My core logic is that if you want to be promoted to the head of a business line, your job scope and skills are very similar. It's just that you are stronger in certain areas. In this figure, you can see that product growth operations are closer to the core business expression. It is relatively easy to be promoted, but this is not certain.

You can say COO is an operation or a product, but it must be in line with the area map I focus on. If I say COO is the chief operating officer and CPO is the chief product officer, many newcomers will think that they must have been promoted from operations or products.

Wrong. COO and CPO may be designers when they first enter the workplace, such as Li Wanqiang of Xiaomi (I will not give examples later because there are still few people who have been promoted from designers to COO or CPO). It may be a product manager, or it may be finance, or even customer service or R&D. Everyone should consider the problem from the ultimate perspective, that is, only consider what skills are required for these positions. What knowledge is needed to hold on to something. The so-called career advancement can actually be regarded as climbing a mountain. There may be many ways to go up the mountain, but the higher you climb, the more skills you need.

Many juniors care too much about the boundaries of positions, thinking that if I work on products, I can be promoted to CPO, if I work on operations, I can be promoted to COO, and if I work on UI and interaction, there is no directly corresponding "position". This is wrong. I have seen a large number of people who work on products and operations but cannot be promoted, and I have also seen a large number of people who work on designers and interactions and are promoted to golden collar positions. Even some fast-moving consumer goods and finance people have become COOs. Whether you can break through the bottleneck depends on whether you can do your essential work well and understand goals, finances, people, resources, business and other issues at your current level. These are related to the career you start with, but not necessarily. Therefore, when entering a career, I suggest that you look at your interest and concentration, so that you can advance to a certain threshold to experience goals, finances, people, resources, business and other issues. Let's talk about the issue of entry threshold.

2. Consider the difficulty of entry and the influence of the position from the perspective of skills

Because we have already mentioned that interest needs to be evaluated, let's understand the difficulty of entry here. From the perspective of learning, the most difficult is data analysis and growth, followed by product manager, then interaction designer and UI designer, and the lowest entry level is operation. Here we emphasize the entry threshold.

Growth and the scope of work for advanced connected people

Let's talk about growth first, because growth requires hard basic knowledge, which are data analysis, product design, and operations. Data analysis is used to analyze problems, product design is used to improve problems, and some growth is solved through operations. In short, it is generally an upgraded skill after getting started with product and operations. I really don't recommend doing growth directly at the beginning.

Next are product managers. They need to learn some simple technical knowledge and product design, including interaction design knowledge, to get started. Now most company product managers have to fully grasp interaction and graphic interface design, and also have to understand some visual knowledge. Because products are at the upstream of interaction and design, they have more complex skills and more knowledge points, which have a certain threshold.

Backend products are not close to users but only to internal business

Here I want to mention the backend product manager . Many people say that backend product managers are valuable, which is totally wrong. The core of backend product managers is to relieve the pressure of the business (supply pressure). From the perspective of capability model and management scope, they are far away from users, but they are very close to supply. Although supply or backend system is to solve supply to meet demand, it is only a small part of the entire business model. We say that getting users to pay directly is the most difficult. They rarely face customers directly, and some are even the backend of the business, supporting some internal company personnel.

Interaction designers and UI designers, let me first say that in some top companies, they are done by the same group of people. Apple does not have interaction specifications and visual specifications, it is called the "human interface guideline" human-computer interaction specification. Because vision and interaction are integrated, it is mainly reflected in visual clickability. However, with the development of China's Internet, the space for interaction designers is getting smaller and smaller. I personally feel that unless large companies or tool products require unified horizontal management of multi-category and multi-platform interactions, there will no longer be a need for a large number of interaction designers. Many interactions are either transferred to products or taken over by product managers. You can say that they are not professional and the experience will be much worse. It doesn't matter, because this is not the core of success or failure. No product is just because it is particularly difficult to use or ugly.

The development of UI designers will gradually integrate interaction, and then move forward to the perspective of conveying brand competitiveness. Many UI designers break through their own expertise and manage product operations. However, many designers care more about beauty and ugliness, and do not care about business expression. So they are basically stuck in the position of UI director. In particular, many designers do not pay attention to business understanding, but simply express visuals. In such an era where posters and self-service tools are flying all over the sky, without sufficient understanding of products, business, and human-computer interaction, they are more likely to be replaced.

Finally, let's talk about operations. Operations is basically a position that requires a real environment. In addition to some basic data analysis skills, which are basic knowledge and basic operations SOP flow, everything else needs to be practiced in a real environment. It is possible to achieve COO, CPO, CGO, and CMO at a high level. Considering the scarcity of the environment, operations is a position with a large number of entrants, a low entry threshold, and a very low success rate. Because the threshold is the lowest, the basic income is relatively low among these people.

3. Analyze each position from the perspective of advancement difficulty and methods

It is relatively easy to advance to high-end products and user growth, but the entry threshold is also higher. Interaction designers, UI is not too close to business, but there is a certain threshold, while operations are close to business, but the entry threshold is the lowest.

From an advanced perspective, we can only talk about products, and user growth is relatively easier. But the core is to learn all the skills that can help business growth in order to grow the business.

Here are two points to remind newcomers:

1) Don’t stick to job titles. Many people think that senior positions must be promoted from low-end positions. If I work hard as a junior product manager, I can be promoted to product president. No one can take it away. As long as I am a designer, I will be useless. I can only be a design director at most. It depends on what the senior position requires. Senior positions can be transferred from any position.

2) Think that you are doing the job of this title under this job title. I am a product manager even if I make samples but have no users. I am an operator even if I write copy and put a banner online. I am a new media because I write articles and post on Weibo and Douyin. These are all illusions.

3) They think they have professional expertise just because of their job title. The most obvious example is that people who work in user experience always think they can do the best user experience, and product managers know users best. I have met subordinates who think they know users better than their boss because they are product managers. In fact, the boss browses forums every day, while they barely browse once every two weeks. People who do design know the most about beauty and ugliness. This is very dangerous. If the professional title is professionalism, then if the company gives me a president of operations, and I take the position, then I will be the person who knows operations best.

4) Pick your job and do it according to your own job title. I am in new media, so I just write articles and post on Weibo. Other things have nothing to do with me. I won’t do it for a penny more. If you want to do it, give me a raise. I am in operation, how can I design products? Those rubbish backends are designed by stupid product managers.

If you want to climb to the top, don't be picky about your job. As long as it can enhance the company's core business, these are your jobs if you want to become a senior manager.

4. Newcomers should consider their interests, abilities, and salary when choosing a career

Newcomers should consider careers from the perspective of interest, ability, and salary. Interest ensures that you can work hard and eventually break through the bottleneck and enter the ranks of senior executives. For example, I also like programming now. But this is also what I discovered as I continue to do product design at work. Programming is still very interesting. I even like finance, operations, and growth now. But if you ask me to enter the Internet industry to do operations, it is unlikely that I will do programming. First of all, I didn’t like operations at the time, and secondly, its entry salary was low.

So if you like operations and your family is okay, you can choose operations. When you are at a high enough level, you will definitely pay attention to products and even data, and then it will be too late to study in depth. People always have super strong motivation after realizing the importance and value.

3. After choosing a career, how to choose a company

1. How to choose industries for different professions

I will focus on the industry selection of product managers in the industry section. Here I will talk about interaction designers and UI designers. And data analysts.

Interaction designers , when you first enter the workplace, it is best to find a large company, which generally has multiple product lines and a large amount of user data, and has very high requirements for interaction, or go to a tool-oriented company, which has the highest requirements for interactive experience. This includes VR and AR, but they are more inclined to hardware, or companies or industries that value data, which will help you to play your value because they care about conversion rate.

I don't recommend UI designers to work for companies that focus on visual design. You can work for companies that have good UI. "Good" here does not mean beautiful, but durable, industrial, not artistic. Many designers think that it is a good thing to have the right to lead and the right to speak, but it is not. It is more about understanding how to make money, the value of design in business, the value of design in the company, and then quickly leading this value. Then places with a stronger business atmosphere are more suitable, which will also help your long-term advancement.

There is nothing to say about data analysts . Startups and small and medium-sized companies don’t have data warehouses. The larger the number of users, the more conducive to analysis, so data warehouses and user numbers are the key points you need to consider. It is best to be a high-frequency trader. The requirements for data analysts and growth officers are the same. If you are interested, you can read my previous articles.

In the next article, we will talk about something more exciting and what everyone is more concerned about, how to choose an industry and a position in a company. Many newcomers who have not yet entered the industry will ask questions like, is AR good? Is big data good? Is artificial intelligence good? Is Bitcoin good? Or they get an offer but don't know if the company is a good match for them. In the next article, we will talk about this exciting question.

I'll stop here. I can't write anymore. I'll write in the next article.

Author: Arun's Growth Research Institute

Source: WeChat public account "Arun's Growth Research Institute (ID: arungrowth365 )"