How to Start a Successful Career in SaaS Enterprises
Are you thinking of joining the SaaS world or have you entered a business? Come and discover how to have a successful career in the area!
Growing exponentially, the job market for SaaS companies is increasing their demand for the best developers and IT professionals to join their development teams to create amazing SaaS products. The brightest minds stand out in this market, as innovation, disruption, and creativity are the pillars that turned this model into the main growth engine in the technology area in the last decade.
In addition to these characteristics, professionals in the area also need to have several additional skills to keep themselves well positioned in the best companies. It is not enough to know how to code lines and lines of programming, this is the basics for the developer. Other positions that integrate the teams of a SaaS enterprise include professionals in the area of digital marketing for attracting and converting customers and Product Owners, for the organization and making critical decisions that turn SaaS products into a long-lasting consumer desire.
Employment and Salary
As the purpose of this model is to work in the cloud, the work also follows the concept of not needing to “be physically” in companies, any professional anywhere in the world can perform their role as long as they can communicate with teammates and speak the same language than other company employees, normally in English.
Considering just the United States, the difference in the unemployment rate between the SaaS market and the general national average is stark, while the general average is 3.6%, the SaaS average is 2.1% in the month of May 2022. This year alone, 2.2 million new vacancies were created and there are 3.9 million unfilled IT positions.
Reported by Business Insider India, in India the salary earned by an IT professional is 30% higher compared to the traditional service model. In the last year, the salaries of employees who already have 2 to 3 years of experience in the area practically doubled, according to Haresh Chawla, partner at True North. In the UK, entry-level positions start at £40,000 per year and with little time on the market can reach a whopping £79,600 per year,
Data reveal all the potential that the SaaS market has to provide successful careers all over the world, with good employability and high salaries, due to the lack of specialized labor and especially of professionals with all the critical skills required by this business model. Next, you'll learn about those skills.
Data Management
For a long time, data management was seen as a specific field for developers, but with the change of scenery, transformed by the world driven by the infinite generation of information, it has become a basic skill for every SaaS professional. Think of the IoT (Internet of Things), there are several points getting data and analyzing them every second to result in the service, anyone who wants to work in the area will have to deal with this type of situation in the future.
In the case of a developer, not every employee will work directly on data storage and accessibility services, but even when architecting the aesthetics of an application, data management will be extremely important, since click-through rates, retention time, learning curve time and several other factors dictate the changes that must be made to improve the user experience to the fullest.
Anyone who deals with product management, such as a Product Owner, will be even more dependent on this type of tool, as data is the main guide to organizing the entire creation, development, capital investment, time, and human resources required in the decision.
Teamwork
Essential in any function or type of job, in software engineering and product development, it can even define whether the company will succeed or fail. As the different parts involved in launching a SaaS product on the market are complementary and interdependent, internal conflicts or communication failures can delay the entire construction, and consequently, increase unnecessary expenses.
In today's market, time is needed because now the competition is worldwide, whoever has more time to conquer the market gains an advantage, updates with the right frequency and without delays also benefit SaaS companies that have a teammate in which each participant knows how to divide, to assist and work together towards a specific objective.
This includes interpersonal skills, or social skills, that the professional will need to develop in himself if he wants to grow in this market. Knowing how to communicate directly with people, whether physically or by videoconference, so as not to cause unintentional discomfort that can at some point become an internal conflict within the company.
Content Personalization and Digital Marketing
Just knowing popular programming languages and platforms such as JAVA, PHP, Linux and Python are no longer enough to keep up with the SaaS market that needs constant innovation, solutions that need to be adapted to organize and automate domestic tasks with a focus on increasing efficiency and comfort. Customized solutions must work within the provided infrastructure, in order to be able to customize according to consumer demand and needs.
Understanding the least about digital marketing is also a differential that is becoming very common, as all services are provided through the cloud, increasing the number of possible users will have social media as the main means of dissemination, with almost half of the world's population using these platforms, SaaS companies must move to where the target audience is.
Problem Solving Skills
This skill has always been preferred by any contractor or company: the ability to solve problems goes far beyond having known, it is a set of other social and technical skills and the desire to make something happen, regardless of whether it is implementing something new or fixing it, and some unforeseen problem. In the SaaS world, bugs, failures, and interference are common due to a large number of existing users and even some physical infrastructure problems that can happen on the servers that host the platforms and data.
Moving towards everyone who works in a SaaS company having a minimum level of knowledge about all other functions, even if it's not yours, this is the movement that will hardly change.