How I Would Start My Career In 2024 (if I could redo over) | Tina Huang

0:00If I were to start my career in 2024, I would be doing things very differently. Over the past year, I've met so many people who have all done the right thing. They went to a good college, they worked hard, they applied to hundreds of jobs, networked aggressively, maybe even did a couple interviews, but no luck. Some of them even went on to get another degree, but months, if not years down the line, still jobless. It feels really unfair, because once upon a time if they worked hard, went through this process, they will get a good job, the way that I did. But now it feels kind of pointless. No matter how hard you're trying, you're still stuck in this pool of overqualified candidates, all trying to compete for just that handful of jobs. So as somebody on the job hunt for roughly six months now, why am I not getting a job? Why is it so hard to find a bloody job? I've really come for three months and I've had one interview. In this video, I like to take a stroll down memory lane and explain the very different career choices I would have made if I were to redo my career and start over in 2024, starting all the way from high school to getting my first job

1:05and starting my own business. This video is sponsored by HubSpot. Back when I was job hunting, what I would essentially do every day is I would log on to all of the different job websites and then just apply to everything I could find. And if they give me an interview, I will put on a spreadsheet and my calendar. I am not the most organized person and I probably ended up applying to the same job multiple times and I probably also missed out on a lot of good opportunities. Not great. And honestly in this job market, you can't really afford to do that anymore because you need every lead that you can find. If I were to do it now, I would take advantage of a super obvious tool. I keep talking about it, AI. That's why I recommend checking out this free toolkit. How to Lennard job using AI from HubSpot. The toolkit has 20 AI tools for you to use as well as 60 plus ways for you to use chat GPT throughout the entire job search process. For example, if you're still manually searching for jobs on LinkedIn or some other job websites, you should consider checking out these smart job matching tools. Are you still writing your cover letters from scratch? Painfully optimizing it for each company. Consider checking out these AI writing tools. Are you considering shelling out like over $100 just to get a mock interview from

2:05someone out of desperation? Trust me, check out chat GPT for doing a mock interview. It will save you $100. I recommend that you download this AI for job seekers toolkit at this link over here, also linked in description. Thank you so much HubSpot for providing free resources to help us leverage the power of AI and for sponsoring this portion of the video. Now back to the video. I graduated high school in 2013 and then I went to university. 2013 was a time assuming that you didn't go into a trade job. The no brainer was that you tried your best again to the best university that you can get to. Maybe take on a little bit debt if you have to and you go there and you try to do your best. This made sense at that time because there weren't really that many higher education alternatives. Online education MOOCs were just starting out. You didn't mean skillshare started in 2010 and they're starting to show a little bit of promise. You'd ask the started in 2011 and Coursera had just started in 2012. YouTube, which is now my default resource whenever I want to learn something educational, I already started since 2005 but in 2013 it was still the era of entertainment. The big names were Nika Higa, PewDiePie, Smosh and makeup tutorial guru

3:12Michelle Phan. Basically knowledge and opportunities were still being gank-capped by universities. The ability to make money that was not tied to a degree or not associated with a degree was also pretty limited. Making money online, which is very cool these days, was still not really considered a real job. So even though universities were still really expensive, there's just this assumption that you should go to university and even though you may be carrying debt, you will be able to make it up when you graduate and get a good job. So yes, I also do it a fully one-to-university but if it were today in 2024, I would seriously reconsider my approach. According to college board, the average tuition for four years in 2023 ranged from around $45,000 for public schools to $166,000 for private schools. Adjust the word inflation, it's about the same as in 2013 and of course you start to spend four years and work very hard. But this degree is considered less useful and actually worth less. For starters, more companies are claiming that they no longer require candidates to

4:13have a four-year degree. But this we should take with a grain of salt because research has also shown that even though it's not required, there's still a preference towards people who have a college degree. And anecdotally, recruiters have claimed that they still do prioritize people who do have four-year degree. But it is certainly true that year on year there are more and more people who do have college degrees now, which means the advantages of having that degree is decreasing as well. In 2013, approximately 32% of US adults over age of 25 have a college degree. Now in 2024, that's projected to be over 40%. There's such an overabundance of people with college degrees that according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, there are 33.8% of college graduates that are working in jobs that don't even require a college degree. If you don't believe this, next time you go to a restaurant, just ask your waiter how many people there have a college degree. I recently did this and almost every single one of them had a college degree. They could have done

5:13the same job without paying tens of thousands of dollars were potentially being in debt and spending four years learning things that were not relevant. To be clear, I'm not saying that you should not get a college degree, especially if you're going for certain careers that are very highly regulated like being a doctor, a lawyer, architect, like a professor. And you definitely do need to get that degree. But in my specific case, I do want to share some of my core personality traits that may challenge the fact that focusing very hard on getting that college degree is the best approach. Number one, I was not a good student. Like I caused a lot of headaches for my past teachers. I was not good at falling directions. And I especially was bad at kind of like organized school activities, like things that have some sort of like rule and some sort of hierarchy. Like for example, student council, like clubs, team sports, things like that. For whatever reason, just having that structure just made me like not want to follow the rules. And definitely I didn't

6:15feel an incentive to climb up like the club ladder when become the like president or something like that. Anyways, my point being in retrospect, this should have given a hint as to the fact that I would not do well in the corporate world. And I just like wouldn't do well in careers that had a lot of regulations and a lot of rules and things like that. Like doctor, teacher, architect, or professor. The profession is that I should care a lot about you having a degree basically. On the other hand, my strength has always been in learning things myself and then applying them myself. I got really good at self-studying at a young age because I realized that if you maintain decent grades, teachers and parents are generally more lenient even if you're not paying attention in class where you don't show up to class. Anyways, self-studying is one of my strengths. And in 2024, there are a lot more educational resources out there in which I could have really like used my strength of self-studying in order to gain an education. Like for example, a Coursera certificate

7:16or joining a professional program like course careers where I would be very focused on learning applied skills met for a specific job role. Side note, if I was good with my hands, if I was starting over in 2024, I definitely would consider going into the trades. There's a short of people in the trades and the average salary in the trades is actually higher now than the average salary for why color workers. I was recently watching this YouTube video of this guy who was interviewing people with jobs in the trades and like kind of like blue color workers. Yeah, and then this girl, she dropped out of school and she was basically saying like I earned like $600,000 a year by starting off as a nail tech and eventually owning nail salons. There's also this video of this Korean kid who got into the best university in Korea but then actually dropped out in order to go into the trades. He joined the team after dropping out of Seoul National University, one of the country's top schools. Anyways, my point being in 2024, I wouldn't necessarily have just like went like no, I'm not going to university but I wouldn't have blindly believed that I should try my best

8:19again to the best university that I can, work as hard as I can and just trust I'm going to get a good job and be set for life. Since that paper doesn't actually matter that much and it's actually decreasing value over time. Some questions that I would think very carefully about would include, hmm, should I actually get an associate's degree or go to community college first to not have that much debt since you know the name of the school and the paper doesn't actually matter that much? Should I consider an alternative higher education where I can still learn the same skills and be job ready but at a portion of the cost and at a portion of the time commit to what I consider going into the trades? Well, in that case I definitely will not because I'm terrible with my hands but you know, for other people that could be worth a consideration. Okay, so assuming that I did choose the go to university, I would definitely change a lot about what I did during university. I started my undergraduate at the University of Toronto in the general life sciences category mostly because my mom told me that I should become a doctor which again if I had more carefully thought about

9:22that. I would not be suitable to be a doctor given my inability to follow directions and problems with authority. I would have realized this was a terrible idea. However, hindsight is 2020 and what actually happened is that in my second year when you had to choose like a specific major, I decided to go into pharmacology which is the study of drugs and the reason why I chose this was because of my friends chosen. That was it. So, surprise, surprise, by my third year I was fucking miserable. I really didn't want to be a doctor but I was getting a pharmacology degree which is not particularly useful unless I'm going into a medical field or going into research. Instead, what I wish I had done if I could restart in 2024 is I would have chosen computer science or computer engineering plus pharmacology or just really like computer science, computer engineering plus something else if you know, I did not know what I wanted to do. Let me explain. So first, I want to address the elephant in the room. If you've been following the AI development, you probably heard Jensen Huang who is the CEO of Nvidia say this. It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody

10:25has the program. So this freed everybody out and they're like, oh my god, like AI is going to replace programmers. So I should definitely not go into computer science or computer engineering. But I greatly disagree. First of all, the job of Jensen Huang or really just any tech CEO is to paint a idealistic picture of the future. There's this video compilation on YouTube called Elon's Broken Promises. We're probably only a month away from having autonomous driving at least for highways and for relatively simple roads. He's been promising this for the past eight years. Last time I checked, the cars still seem to have drivers. Disappointing. So even if Jensen's promise comes true and there's going to be no need for programmers in the future, I still think there's value in learning computer science and computer engineering. And that is because I believe that most people are misunderstanding what Jensen Huang is saying when he says, nobody has the program. People just kind of assume that programming is equal to computer science is equal to engineering. So bad, no more computer science, no more engineering. But in the same speech, when asked what it is

11:29that he recommends people learn in the future, he also says this, if I were to do it over again, I would realize that the technology to turn life science to live engineering is upon us. And that digital biology will be a field of engineering, not a field of science. That's where the misunderstanding comes from. Programming does not equate to computer science and engineering. In fact, programming is actually a very small part of computer science and computer engineering. What you're really learning, this degree is the ability to problem solve. How do you think like an engineer? What are engineering principles? If subjects like drug discovery, the medical sciences, life sciences is going to fall into the domain of engineering, then learning about these engineering principles is going to be more relevant than ever. This is why I've had to choose a major in 2024. I would choose computer science as computer engineering plus another domain like the life sciences. This will position myself well to have the skills in order to tackle the problems of the future. During college, I would also make sure to focus

12:30a lot on internships and gaining work experience. Ask any recruiter in a sea of applicants where most people have more than a 3.5 GPA. The difference between getting hired or not hired is having a slightly higher GPA. What makes the difference is having job experience. If I were doing my university years in 2024, I would focus most of my attention not on getting good grades, but on getting as much work experience as I can. So yes, you're probably thinking right now, but Tina, how do I get job experience if I don't have any job experience? So this is one thing that I did get right back in 2014-2015. You got to lower your expectations. You're right. Nobody is going to offer you an internship or offer you the chance of getting job experience when you have no job experience. So what you got to do is humble yourself and go find some research labs and research professors and just be like, hello professor, can you please allow me to do free labor at your lab? I sent up probably over 100 cold emails and literally went to go knock on a

13:31door of some professors that I knew. And just being like, hi professor, please, please, please, please, can I please work at your lab? For free. I did that and finally a very kind professor took a chance on me and allowed me to work at his lab. I ended up working as lab for free and I put down on my resume which made me look like I have relevant work experience. It's a small stepping stone, but that allowed me to get another job at a research lab which then converted to a paid job. In 2024, I would still do this and I would actually be even more aggressive like going to everybody including friends and family and also being like, please, please, please, can you please let me do free labor for you? Because I know that only by doing this, I'm able to stand out in this very difficult job market. The last thing I would make sure to do in my undergraduate, I would restart in 2024 is to make myself very specialized in a skill set. So I don't care what your feelings are about AI, whether you think it's going to change the world, whether you think it's a complete scam, but what is undeniable is that AI is a very valuable skill set that most companies are looking for. Like job post things,

14:35even those outside of a tech are starting to list AI as either a basic required skill or a desirable skill. To me, this is an absolute no-brainer. Go learn some AI skills. We'll make you stand out because it's clearly desirable to companies. There's not that many people who know how to use AI properly and it's really not that hard to get started. For some reason, people have this misconception that learning how to use AI is really hard. I requires you to know how to code and just be like very technical. Well, yes, if you're going to go build an AI product from scratch, that is very difficult, but just learning how to use AI related to your specific domain can make you stand out a lot. For example, if you're in marketing, learn how to use HubSpot and HubSpot AI. If you're in drug discovery, learn how to use specialized models like IBM Watson, Adam Wise, Beninvalent AI. For anybody looking for a white collar job, learn how to do prom engineering well and you would just get so much productivity gain just out of chat GPT and things like Microsoft co-pilot. If I were redoing my career in 2024, I would absolutely learn how to use AI. Then after I learned

15:37these AI skills, I would put on my resume and I will keep applying for jobs and emphasize the fact that I know AI skills. And at the same time, I would also start marketing myself on LinkedIn, writing medium articles, showcasing these AI skills that I'm learning in my specific domain. Maybe I'll even start making internet videos and teaching people these AI skills. Damn, maybe I would have started my own companies four years earlier than the real timeline. Because in 2024, there are just so many opportunities to earn money online. Okay, before I get ahead of myself and start going on a rant about how in this economy, freelancing can actually be more lucrative and secure than a full-time job, let me first address the next career choice I had, getting a master's degree. I didn't know what to do with myself when I realized I didn't want to be a doctor back in 2016. And I guess I had a pharmacology degree which is not very useful. Luckily by the time I graduated in 2017, I had convinced that nice professor that I was doing free labor for to give me a full-time job doing bound for mathematics, specifically cancer genetics

16:39research. I am honestly so grateful to him because that was where I learned how to code on a job. And I even got the opportunity to publish a couple of papers. But what I really wanted was a job in tech. Because honestly, being in research does not pay very well and a job in tech pays very well. And just being in tech was like the cool thing, the dream back then. This is when I started thinking about upskilling and learning more things from a technical perspective like computer science. Because I thought that it would give me a better chance in letting a job in tech. At that time, Coursera was becoming very popular. And in the year 2016 was when Coursera partnered with a major university, the University of Illinois, to bring a world-class degree program fully online. I actually did consider going down the route of online education and I also looked at some of the coding boot camps. But it still felt like it was early days and I didn't really want to be a guinea pig at that time. Plus, getting a master's degree in computer science at a top university would have almost guaranteed me a job in tech. So I applied to a few different master's program and I eventually

17:44got accepted into the University of Pennsylvania's master's of computer information technology program, which was essentially computer science for people who did not have a background in computer science. Before accepting to offer, I did the math. Tuition for two years was approximately 112K. Well, that is definitely a lot of money. The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences published their job placement of their graduates. As a whole, those who have a master's degree from the engineering school received an average annual salary of approximately $126,000 and he ranged from $67,000 to $300,000. This means that if I were to earn the average salary after tax, I should be able to earn back my tuition fee in two years. It seemed like job placement was also very high with 75% of graduates finding employment at top companies and I absolutely made the right choice. Within eight months, I was able to secure an internship at Goldman Sachs as a technology summer analyst, which is basically software engineering. Then when I graduated, I got a job as a data scientist at Meta. My salary was actually higher than average and I was

18:48able to earn back my tuition in about a year and a half. But that was back in 2020. I was recently chatting with one of my old professors at Penn and we were discussing how since the pandemic, it has been a lot more stressful for students and a lot harder for them to find internships and jobs at top companies. It seems like having a master's degree at paper from a fancy school like Penn just didn't cut it anymore and it really isn't that the quality of students is getting lower. There is genuinely just less top jobs to go around. So this was anecdotal but I was curious to see if this was reflected in any of the numbers or reports that Penn publishes. When I graduated in 2020, the number of people who were employed was listed as 75.4%. With 90.4% of graduates being either employed in a role in continuing education or serving in a military in the first six months graduation. Now for 2023, the numbers are 78.8% of full-time employment with 92.6% of graduates who

19:51were either employed in role in continuing education, volunteering, serving in military were not seeking a job in the first six months after graduation. Very interesting. So at first glance, it actually looks like people who graduated in 2023 are doing better than those who graduated in 2020, which is my year. However, as someone who's worked very closely with data, I also know that data is very easily manipulated. And Penn absolutely has an incentive in order to manipulate these numbers in order to make it look like that things are looking good, right? I mean, I really can't say anything for certain, but first of all, these statistics Penn doesn't publish them by master's degrees. They like combine everything into the masters of engineering. So we don't actually know what the breakdown looks like for all of the different masters degrees in engineering. A couple other interesting things to note in 2023, the number of full-time employment is 78.8% so that is higher than a 75.4%. At first glance, it looks like, oh, like there's more people who have full-time employment, more people who

20:54have job placements, right? In 2023. But if you look a little bit closer, in 2020, the top hiring employers were big tech companies. Amazon with 40 people hired, Facebook with 22 people hired, Google 15 and then going down a list, Microsoft Oracle, Apple, McKinsey and company, Qualcomm, Boeing company, Accenture, Huawei technology, Uber, right? So these are all a very big companies, very prestigious, intact and consulting in these places. But if you look at this list in 2023, so the first is still Amazon hiring 43 employees. But the second one is University of Pennsylvania, hiring 22 employees. Very interesting. It seems like the school is hiring a lot of its own students. I don't know, looks a little sus, but you know, can't say for sure, just pointing it out. But luckily, there are more objective sources of the worth of a master's degree. According to workplace analytics from pay scale, some of the master's degree average salary in the US is $83,000, which is about $20,000 increase over an undergraduate degree. But does that justify the cost of the

21:58master's degree? Well, according to the education data initiative, the average cost of a master's degree is $59,000 for a public school and around $88,000 for a private school. They're radically speaking over time that the master's degree should pay for itself, maybe between three to 10 years. However, given the fact that unemployment rates for a master's degree is also quite this small, the greater likelihood is that you still would not be able to find a job and now you just have more money that you've sunk in, potentially have even more debt now that you're trying to pay. So what this means is that nowadays in 2024, I would think a lot more carefully about getting an additional piece of paper because I can't find a job. With the decline of the tech industry, you don't really have that kind of thing that everybody's aiming for now. Like some job that will just give you really good salary, really good benefits and you know that it's just going to be there. With the fall attack, there's a lot less good jobs out there. No will be worth putting extra money and extra time into getting a master's degree for. Besides, most people also have the same

23:03idea. They can't get a job with an undergraduate degree so they're like, okay, I should go get a master's degree and such to increase my chances. But again, we're all just becoming more, more over qualified and we're still competing for the same number of jobs, except now we are more in debt and more desperate. In 2024, if I'm trying to get a job or change my career, I would probably not go for a master's degree. The risk is not worth a reward right now. And there's a lot more low cost options for education now too. For example, even MCIT, the pen degree that I did now has an online equivalent, which is about a third of the price of the on campus. Like I mentioned earlier, there are also professional programs like course careers, which are designed specifically to get you certain type of job. Udacity has some really great professional programs and some big companies like IBM and Google have their own certificates in partnership with Coursera. I would offer one of these lower cost options to learn things and still be put out my resume and my portfolio by taking on contract jobs. Okay, so after my master's degree, I resumed applying for jobs. I was talking to

24:04a new grad just a few days ago and he told me that he applied to hundreds of jobs, but couldn't get anything. And I said, okay, interesting, send me your resume. So I've actually met her a lot of new grads before and the first thing I always ask them is to show me their resume because usually it's just the way that the resume was formatted that just makes it like not appealing to recruiters. But in this case, like his resume was actually pretty good. So then I asked a little bit more about these hundreds of jobs that he applied for. I asked him, okay, hundreds of jobs and how did you apply for these jobs? Did you just do them all online? Did you go to networking events? He was like, yeah, I did go to networking events, but most of them are online now and they didn't really like do anything. So I was like, okay, you also went to NYU, which is a top school. And I know for a fact that top schools like NYU, they actually have companies go to their school to conduct interviews specifically for their students. He said, yeah, he looked into those as well, but over the past few years, it's really dried out. And there are fewer and fewer companies actually go into the school to interview candidates. At this point, I was kind of like, holy shit, poor guy. You see, my method in

25:08job hunting in 2020 was basically just doing that. I cast a very wide net and applied to hundreds of jobs both online and went to networking events and also took advantage of the school network I was in. And I did fine. And my peers all did fine too. But clearly things are different in 2024. If I were to be job hunting in 2024, this is what I would do. So like we talked about earlier, we need to make ourselves stand out by having internships, learning and demand skills like AI skills. So I would go do that and keep applying for jobs and maybe try to see if anybody would adopt me as a net put baby. But at the same time, I wouldn't be holding my breath and just hoping someone would give me a job. I would actually be building my own freelancing career on the side. In 2024, we live in what is called a gig economy, which is defined as a labor market characterized by the prevalence of short-term contracts where freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs. According to a report by team stage, 36% of US workers are now part of the gig economy, with nearly a third of US workers having a gig job as their primary engagement. This is super

26:10interesting. A third of people in America no longer have a full-time job. They just focus on part-time work, freelancing, contracting, gig work. The report also predicts that by 2027, over 50% of US workforce is likely to participate in the gig economy. This makes a lot of sense. As companies are laying off full-time employees, they still have work that needs to get done, right? So in their place, they hire contractors and freelancers and part-time people, these gig workers, to go and do these jobs instead. So it kind of makes sense to not fight this trend and just still try to go for the smaller number of full-time jobs now. Why don't we actually go with this trend and also start participating in the gig economy? Decavia here, though, is to do well in the gig economy. You need to have a specialized enough skill aside so that you're in demand for a specific project for a specific company. As you see, this ties again into this whole theme of needing to be more specialized and needing to stand out. So in 2024, I would be doing everything in my power to be learning these unique skill sets

27:14and then just plastering them all over my social media so that people will know about me and companies will know that I'm offering these services. This video is already really, really long. Let me know in the comments if you want me to make a video about how it is that I would start a freelancing business via gig economy business in 2024. Anyways, okay, let's now actually finish off the rest of my career story. Where we left off, I eventually landed a full-time job at Metta as a data scientist, which was that nice cushy job that I really wanted to have at that time. Fun fact, though, when I quit to pursue content and freelancing full-time, I actually did this only a few months before the first Metta layoff started. So chances are if I actually stayed at Metta, I would have gotten laid off as well. Who knows? Anyways, my point being that in 2024, knowing that this was going to happen, even if I did have a nice cushy job right now, I would not be chilling. The economy is not great. Layoffs are happening everywhere. There's no such thing as job security

28:16these days. I would be making a point in diversifying my income and building out other sources of income so that if I do get laid off, it won't hurt as much and who knows? Maybe it would be like a blessing in disguise because I already have a freelance career that's taking off and I would just be like, well, I guess I got laid off, take my severance pay, very good severance package, and just pursue freelancing full-time. Alright, so this is the end of today's video. I hope that was helpful, which is going through, I guess, my past and talking about the choices that I would have made instead in 2024. Let me know in the comments what stage of your career you're at right now and what are the questions that you're asking yourself, what are the decision points that you're trying to make. And I will see you guys in the next video or live stream.