My Tech Transition: How Boluwatife Akindele went from Journalist to Content Strategist
From pitching stories to editors to leading the content team at Piggyvest, Boluwatife Akindele shares his tech transition story with us
My Tech Transition is a monthly ConTech series that shines a spotlight on Africans who have successfully transitioned into tech.
Written by David Onugha
From pitching stories to editors to leading the content team at Piggyvest, Boluwatife Akindele, who is Contech Africa’s first-ever Community Manager, shares his tech transition story with us.
How did you get started with Contech Africa?
Daniel (Orubo), the Contech Africa co-founder, reached out to tell me about some projects he was working on and asked if I’d be interested in working with him on them. He had been my team lead at Piggyvest and I really enjoyed working with him, soI was automatically on board with the idea of joining him on other projects. After a few weeks, he briefed me about Contech and that’s how everything started.
In the first few weeks, we didn’t even have a name for my role. I worked with Ope Adedeji (Co-founder, ConTech Africa) and Daniel on everything else.
As the former Community Manager, what aspect of community management did you find more fulfilling?
It might sound cliché, but seeing the role ConTech plays in people's tech transition stories brings me so much joy. Watching members go from trying to secure scholarships for courses to starting their own projects and significantly improving the quality of discussions in the community makes it all worth it.
Also, one of the major worries that comes with starting something from scratch is the fear that it might not grow, but seeing the community grow weekly was also very fulfilling.
You’re currently the Senior Content Strategy Associate at Piggyvest, what does your role entail?
A lot of the work I do is leading the Piggyvest content team. I work with a team of writers, animators, and illustrators to shape content direction and output at Piggyvest.
My day-to-day generally involves working on my tasks, checking in with my team members on their projects, reviewing analytics to see what could be done better, and having one-on-ones with my team members to see how their work can be improved and how they can be supported. I also review blog posts and figure out the direction our content takes weekly.
We recently launched the Piggyvest Savings Report 2024 and this is something that took up a chunk of my time in the past few months. I was responsible for shaping the final project, and I had to provide regular updates to management while the project was underway.
What did you do before Piggyvest?
I was many things - a freelance journalist mostly, and I dabbled in consulting and freelance for a media-tech company, Joy Inc. It’s the company that produces the viral WithChude show, among other projects.
Would you say that your community management experience has been useful to you in your content strategy career?
I would say in many ways, they fed into each other. Community management gave me a lot of room to experiment with things. I’d try out different experiments at ConTech and if they worked, I’d implement them at Piggyvest.
I think a lot about engaging a community - what does it take to keep a community of people constantly engaged daily? One of the things that really built my muscle was creating content to be posted within the community every week. I’d think about what people want to see on certain days and create content around that. I also worked with Daniel to determine the best communication plan for the community. This also strengthened my intuition in knowing what delights my audience and what does not interest them.
Can you walk us through your transition from journalism to tech?
What’s very interesting about my move to tech is that I didn't even know I was transitioning into tech the way people talk about it now. I just thought freelance journalism was a very unstable career path, especially if you want to have a financially stable life. As a freelance journalist, so it meant that for much of the time, I was always looking for stories, pitching them to editors, and hoping they commissioned me. I would then spend the next few days or months writing the article. Some publications paid immediately, but sometimes, I would be paid 30 days after it was published. I didn’t have a constant source of stable income and that was very destabilising. It also meant my finances were determined by how many stories I could pitch and write within a certain period.
The one thing I know how to do, based on journalism, is storytelling. So I sent a cold email to Daniel Orubo talking about how I’d be a good fit at Piggyvest. I didn’t think I was coming to a content team as much as I was coming to Piggyvest to be a storyteller. I thought that these skills I had as a journalist - knowing what makes a story, knowing how to look for a story, knowing the elements that shape a story, and knowing how to present a story - were important in any company and would be particularly useful in Piggyvest and I could just transfer them from my journalism experience. Before journalism, I worked as a photographer, video editor, graphic designer, personal assistant, chief of staff, social media manager, and many other roles I can’t even remember now—I've even built a website. I thought the common thread connecting these roles was my passion for storytelling—it’s how all these skills made sense to me.
Coming into Piggyvest, I had to learn content marketing and Daniel was very helpful with sharing a lot of resources. I remember he shared an article from contentfolks.com with me that helped with thinking about my role more strategically, and I became obsessed with the blog. I also took HubSpot courses and followed a lot of content marketing leaders on social media.
I think on a very base level, that sharp instinct for what makes a story and what makes a story work made my transition into content marketing seamless.
From your experience, what advice would you give to anyone looking to transition into the tech industry?
One of the major tips would always be to sell yourself, but not in the way people talk about selling yourself online. There’s a lot of talk about branding and while this is important, when it comes to securing a tech job, people are not immediately thinking about your branding as much as your ability to tell a compelling story on why you should be hired. Daniel always talks about how the pitch I sent to him via email is one of the best pitches he has ever seen. He did a breakdown of it on LinkedIn which I think might be better than any breakdown I can do.
If you're transitioning into the tech industry, you most likely may not be a perfect fit on paper. For example, if a job listing for a content marketing associate requires 2-3 years of experience, you likely won’t have that exact experience. However, you may probably have all the skills that make someone a great content marketer. This is especially true if you’re transitioning from journalism, writing, or any similar field. How do you communicate that, since you developed these instincts in a previous role, you can perform well in this new role? How do you then highlight where you’ve proven your ability to do the job and explain how you’ll apply these skills to benefit the company? If you’re able to distill these into a coherent story to a hiring manager, you have a higher chance of being hired compared to when you apply via a traditional route. So, it is important to learn how to pitch yourself.
I think you should also be open to consuming information as much and fast as you can. This is because, in tech, there is a lot of technical lingo that people throw around, especially in meetings. It doesn’t mean that you don’t know what is being spoken about, it just means that what you know is being communicated with technical jargon. This jargon is important to show the depth of your understanding of that field. It is very important to learn as fast and broadly as you can. So, once you hear something unfamiliar in a meeting, note it down and carry out extensive research on it. One of my biggest hacks for knowledge is to search for that particular thing on TikTok because I know the algorithm will recommend similar content for me.
The third tip, which many people will probably disagree with, is to be open to a pay cut. A lot of people talk about tech like it’s a place that pays a huge sum of money as you start your career, which could be true. But when transitioning into a new field, especially if your skills are still being evaluated by employers, a temporary pay cut might be necessary. In many cases like mine, it pays off. If you’re entering a field where you want to grow, especially from a non-tech background, you should be open to a slight pay cut for potential growth. However, this doesn’t mean you should take just any offer.