💻 Land a tech job: day in the life + job postings

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“What’s it like working remotely at a tech startup?”

I get this question all the time.

So I tracked my time for a month, showing you the realistic breakdown of what I do day-to-day. You’ll get clarity on what to expect for your career in tech.

Read below for:

My role in a tech startup - and the surprising #1 most useful skill in my work
My typical day - and what you can learn from it
Insights from tracking my time - and takeaways for your career success
Job postings (EntryLevel is hiring!)

Psst: curious how I learned to clean and analyze the data in today’s article? I took EntryLevel’s Data Analyst program last October and it’s been a game-changer. Just look at the difference in my dashboards:

Before and after taking entrylevel's data analyst level 1 program

Interested in sponsoring Level Up? Learn more and apply here.

My role

In case we haven’t met before, hi 👋

I’m Jennifer, the Growth Associate at EntryLevel.

Since EntryLevel is still a pretty small startup, I have a range of responsibilities:

Content marketing (writing blogs, newsletter articles like this one)
Social media marketing (managing all our social media accounts)
Events
Growth experiments (A/B testing our emails, website, etc.)

Here are the most useful skills for my role:

Data analysis - marketing and product data
Communication - mainly writing
Design - for social media
Creativity - coming up with growth experiment ideas based on existing data
Interpersonal - engaging with our students for events and user interviews

What this means for you

Don’t feel pressured to find a “data analyst” job just because you studied data analysis. You can see that I use a lot of data skills in my work, but my role is a marketer.

The more skills you learn, the more effective you can be at any job you enjoy. The sky’s the limit when it comes to your career, so don’t feel boxed into 1 role for the rest of your life.

My typical day

10:00am: wake up (I sleep in because the hours are pretty flexible)

10:30am: catch up on Slack messages and emails

11:00am: review marketing and experiment analytics

Example: I’ll look at open and clickthrough rates for this email newsletter. I’m currently experimenting with using emojis in subject lines to see if it increases open rates - you’ll notice our most recent newsletters all have emojis in the subject! We didn’t do that before.

12:00pm: write weekly article for email newsletter

1:00pm: social media (while eating lunch)

Our support team answers most DMs, but I check Twitter and LinkedIn replies and mentions.

1:30pm: meetings (sometimes these are in the morning or evening in my timezone)

Meeting with students (our users) to chat about the product
Meeting with potential partners

4:00pm: miscellaneous tasks (depends on the day)

Website edits and experiments, like changing button colour, copywriting
Content creation and scheduling (social media, ad creatives)
Improving copywriting in our existing email funnels
Reviewing other people’s work
Communicating with freelancers

7:00pm: workout class (or break from work)

9:00pm: sometimes I have meetings pretty late into the night due to the timezone differences

11:00pm: free time (read, journal, go on my phone)

What this means for you

Do you prefer flexibility or routine?

Some companies expect you to stick to a strict 9-5 schedule. Some people prefer this because you have a clear “cut-off” time where you don’t do any work.

However, you may prefer working at a company that provides flexibility, where you can choose your own hours.

I definitely prefer flexibility, which is why I was very careful about the jobs I applied for to ensure the company’s culture aligned with my values.

Insights from time tracking

Here’s a graph of how much time I spent on each task at work. You can also press “play” on slide 2 to see a task breakdown by day (some days I hosted events or worked a bit on weekends and adjusted my hours accordingly during the week).

See graph here: https://public.flourish.studio/story/1863122/

1. Effective collaboration and communication skills is a must

A lot of my time is spent in meetings or responding to Slack messages/emails, where we:

Brainstorm
Strategize
Make important decisions
Give and receive updates on projects

If others can’t understand you, you’ll waste a lot more time trying to get things done.

(Hit reply and let me know if I should share tips to develop your soft skills in another newsletter article!)

2. Make data-informed decisions

I spend so much time on marketing analytics because you can find so many hidden gems in data.

A recent example is when I discovered our sign up page’s bounce rate (% of people who leave a site after only viewing 1 page) was super high. This was bad because we wanted people to stay on our website so they sign up.

I hypothesized that if we added more details about our program (including testimonials, logos of companies, etc.) to our signup page, the bounce rate would decrease since more people would be curious about our programs, and thus sign up and navigate to another page.

This experiment is still ongoing so I don’t have the results yet.

I highly recommend all aspiring product managers, data analysts, marketers, and startup founders read this article on data and metrics - if you implement this, you’ll stand out from 90% of other job seekers.

3. Learning never ends

If you ever stop learning at your job, or you don’t feel challenged, then it’s time to change something.

Although the chart above shows I spend the least amount of time “learning” (from an online course), it’s because I learn by doing my day-to-day tasks. That’s my favourite way to learn, in my opinion: learning by experience.

That’s why I loved the EntryLevel Data Analyst program I took. Because the program was super hands-on and practical, I immediately applied my learning to my work. I still copy paste the formulas I learned from that program when I work with marketing data today.