My Tech Transition: How Daniel Orubo went from Editor-in-Chief to Head of Content
For ConTech's first anniversary, we spoke with our co-founder, Daniel Orubo, to discover the story behind his transition into tech.
My Tech Transition is a monthly ConTech series that shines a spotlight on Africans who have successfully transitioned into tech.
Written by David Onugha
For ConTech's first anniversary, we spoke with our co-founder, Daniel Orubo, to discover the story behind his transition into tech. He talked about ConTech's plans for the future and shared insightful advice for anyone pondering a career transition.
As the Head of Content Strategy at PiggyVest, what does your role entail?
It's mostly about thinking through the kind of content my team can create to achieve PiggyVest’s business goals. With our content, we are typically either teaching people about the product or teaching them to make smarter money decisions, including saving and investing with PiggyVest.
I lead the production of different types of content to engage existing and potential customers, whether it's a comic series like Grown Ups to engage a younger audience or a savings report to establish our position as thought leaders.
What's a typical workday like for you?
It really depends on the projects we have in the pipeline. My most consistent task is making sure we are publishing relevant articles on our blog weekly. Then based on the day, you could either find me editing a script for Grown Ups, carrying out keyword research for the blog or approving pitches.
You were the Editor-In-chief at Zikoko before moving to PiggyVest, how were you able to make a successful transition into tech?
I think what helped was that Zikoko was run like a tech company. Before we released any new content series, we did a lot of research and worked on a comprehensive document detailing our target audience, how we planned to engage them, and how we wanted the content to grow our general audience. I didn't even realise it at the time, but I was already a content marketer.
Then I went on to do a Hubspot Content Marketing course and a Digital Marketing course from Google. These courses not only showed me that I’d been a content marketer for a while, but they also taught me some solid frameworks for improving my output and all the technical language I needed to properly sell myself as a tech marketer.
Were there any specific skills you had to pick up along the way?
I love learning, so once I got the chance, I took a CXL Product Marketing course to understand how best to position products for the market. This has made me a better content marketer and a better tech marketer in general. I think more like a strategist now, asking questions like what we are trying to achieve with the content we put out and how will it appeal to our target audience?
So the product marketing course helped me to think about things in a broader sense, and I think it has really impacted my work.
How did your tech transition journey influence the founding of ConTech?
When I moved to PiggyVest, a lot of people were interested in knowing how I did it. Instead of answering people individually, I thought of creating a community so we could all help each other. While my transition was relatively smooth, it still involved a lot of trial and error.
I found the HubSpot content marketing course by accident and had already spent a year at PiggyVest before I did the product marketing course. I also did a lot of reading beyond the marketing courses I took, but most of them weren't beneficial. There are so many things I did later on in my career that would have been done earlier if I had someone to guide me. My field of view was very limited, and I think that's because I was going on the journey by myself.
I wanted to create a community of people who could share their experiences, resources and advice, helping people feel less alone in their career transition. Ope Adediji, my co-founder, had a similar experience moving from Zikoko to Paystack. We thought having something like ConTech would be beneficial for other people on a similar path.
As ConTech celebrates its first anniversary, what initiatives are underway to further support individuals seeking to transition into the tech industry?
There are so many things that we want to do, but it's a function of getting the right donations because we are a not-for-profit. I would love us to provide more scholarships because we get lots of requests for them, but we can only pick so many people.
We did a pilot mentorship program, and I think it went well. We want to expand it and get more mentors. I want more people to learn from others because I know that there are so many people out there like us that want to give back, but they need structure.
So what we want to do at ConTech is to create structures that make it easy for people who have gotten to a certain level in their tech career to give back. We want to have more free bootcamps because people found the previous ones very useful. The idea generally is to provide more of what we're already doing.
What advice would you give anyone looking to make a successful transition into tech?
Not to oversell ourselves, but joining a community is very essential. It doesn't have to be our community, but I hope you pick ours.
You also need to study; it can't be helped. It doesn't have to be a course, you can read articles or listen to podcasts. Just find somebody who does the work you're trying to do and learn from them. I recently discovered a content marketing newsletter, which I found really insightful, so I went back and read every issue of this newsletter. I learned so many frameworks from it that I use at work today.
Beyond learning, look for opportunities to test out the things you've learned. You don't have to wait for a job, you can play around with something that you made. If you want to be a digital marketer, for example, try and create a digital marketing strategy for a friend’s business.