I Have a Social Work Degree and I Work in Tech
My bachelor’s degree is in Social Work from Ohio State. Not computer science. Not information systems. Social Work.
I get asked about this a lot, usually with a facial expression somewhere between confusion and polite concern. So here’s the story.
Why Social Work
I wanted to help people. That wasn’t a phase or a placeholder while I figured out what I “really” wanted to do. I went to OSU, studied social work, graduated, and intended to build a career around it.
What I didn’t anticipate was how quickly I’d burn out on the systemic parts of the job: the bureaucracy, the funding constraints, the emotional weight of the work with very little structural support. I have enormous respect for people who stay in that field. I lasted about two years before I started looking for exits.
The Pivot
What pulled me toward tech wasn’t a coding bootcamp ad or a “learn to code” blog post. It was solving problems. I’d always been the person who figured things out — building spreadsheets, automating workflows, being the unofficial IT person in every office I worked in. When I started exploring what a career in tech actually looked like, networking and infrastructure clicked immediately.
I got my CCNA. That was the real starting point. Not a CS degree, not a bootcamp — a networking certification that proved I could learn technical material and pass a rigorous exam. That cert got me in the door at Veeam, where I’ve been ever since. (I still remember the Pearson VUE testing center smelling like carpet cleaner. Weird detail but it’s stuck in my brain.) From there I pushed hard: VCP-DCV, VMCE, VMCA, one after another. Every cert opened up more of the infrastructure world and proved to myself and everyone else that the social work kid could hang.
What Social Work Gave Me That a CS Degree Wouldn’t Have
People don’t expect this, but a social work background is actually useful in tech. Not in a hand-wavy “soft skills matter” way. In a concrete, daily, practical way.
In social work, you learn to hear what someone is actually telling you, not just what they’re saying. In technical support, that skill is the difference between a 30-minute call and a 3-hour call. Customers describe symptoms, not root causes. Knowing how to listen past the surface is a trained skill, and I got thousands of hours of practice before I ever touched a terminal.
There’s also the crisis management piece. When a customer’s production environment is down and they’re losing money every minute, the emotional temperature of that call is high. I’d spent years working with people in actual life crises. A backup failure, no matter how urgent, was never going to rattle me the way my previous work had. That calm under pressure got me noticed early in my career.
And the writing. Social work is drowning in case notes, assessments, and reports. I learned to write clearly and concisely for audiences who didn’t share my context. Turns out that’s exactly what technical writing is.
Would I Do It Differently?
No. The unconventional path is what makes me effective. I think about users differently than someone who’s been in tech since college. I think about failure modes differently. I think about documentation differently. These aren’t things I had to learn. They’re things I brought with me.
If you’re reading this and you have a “non-traditional” background and you’re wondering if you belong in tech — you do. Tech has plenty of people who can write code. It has way fewer people who know how to actually talk to a panicking customer at 2am. That’s worth something.