Breaking Into Technology with a Non-Traditional Background (Udemy.com)
Learn strategies for landing a tech career without a computer science degree, or without prior professional experience.
Created by: Sundog Education by Frank Kane
Last updated August 2026
What you will learn
- Build up your own technical experience that translates to career opportunities
- Tailor your resume or C.V. to showcase what tech employers really want
- Practice a mock interview with a technical hiring manager
- Expand your professional network to access the hidden job market
- Identify the habits and unconventional ways of approaching problems that work to your advantage in technology
Course Description
Do you love technology, but you're having a hard time turning that passion into a career?
Maybe you're largely self-taught, or have a non-traditional career path. You're looking for your dream job online, but you keep running up against requirements for a computer science degree or professional experience you don't have yet. It may seem like an impossible problem, but it isn't!
I was a technical hiring manager where I interviewed over 1,000 candidates - and I know what tech employers are really looking for. It's not just what's in the listed job requirements. I've also attacked this from the other side - I never had a CS degree myself, yet I ended up as a senior manager at Amazon leading a team of 50 engineers, and ultimately as CEO of my own tech company. This course will teach you the secrets of how tech hiring really works, and how you can turn that to your advantage - regardless of your background.
The tenacity and perseverance that drove you to teach yourself the latest technology are exactly what companies need. I'll show you how to flip your non-traditional career path into an advantage, by stressing the valuable habits and ways of thinking your unconventional path gave you.
This concise course will cover:
What tech employers really care about (it's mainly what you can build, and not your background.)
How to gain the prior experience you need, when you need experience to get a job. It's not the impossible situation it seems.
Building your professional network - the connections you make are essential to getting past the gatekeepers to the best tech jobs.
The essential habits your non-traditional background gave you, and how to build a narrative about their value to prospective employers.
How to turn your unconventional education or experience to your advantage - you can "think different" from other engineers, and that's a good thing.
You'll also get 6 hands-on activities to turn what you learn into action:
Optimizing your resume or C.V. when you're largely self-taught
Identifying projects to build more tech experience you can do on your own
Identifying organizations and projects that lead to professional networking opportunities
Articulating your unique and valuable habits in the form of narratives for interviewers
Preparing stories for behavioral interviews that highlight the strengths of your non-traditional background
A mock interview with a technical hiring manager
If you're tired of being held back from an interesting and lucrative career in technology, enroll now. You don't need to go into debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars and get a PhD in computer science. With just the right strategies from this course, and dose of your own determination, you can start a technology career that will change your life.
This course was created by an experienced human - no generative AI or ChatGPT was used to generate its content.
Instructor Details
- 4.7 Rating
121 Reviews
Sundog Education by Frank Kane
Sundog Education's mission is to make highly valuable career skills in data engineering, data science, generative AI, AWS, and machine learning accessible to everyone in the world. Our consortium of expert instructors shares our knowledge in these emerging fields with you, at prices anyone can afford.
As a senior manager at Amazon during its early years, Frank Kane led large technical teams, managed multi-year projects, and served as a "bar-raiser" - interviewing thousands and hiring hundreds across the company.
Frank holds 26 issued patents in machine learning and personalization. After 9 years at Amazon and IMDb, he founded Sundog Education and has since taught over 1.1 million people in AI, ML, AWS, system design, and tech leadership. Frank has been teaching full-time for over 10 years - but is always building projects on the side with the latest emerging technologies, to better explain them to you!
Our teaching style is to simplify complex concepts - once you cut through all the notation and jargon, most of AI and machine learning is pretty easy to understand. We make these advanced topics accessible to anyone with a modest technical background, always using plain English and examples to drive it home. We make learning easy, hands-on, and fun.
More courses by Sundog Education by Frank Kane
Machine Learning, Data Science & AI Engineering with Python (2026)
4.6 (36,937 Reviews)
Provider: Udemy
Time: 20.2h
$139.99
The Ultimate Hands-On Hadoop: Tame your Big Data! (2026)
4.5 (31,163 Reviews)
Provider: Udemy
Time: 14.5h
$159.99
Apache Spark with Scala - Hands On with Big Data! (2026)
4.3 (18,945 Reviews)
Provider: Udemy
Time: 8.9h
$124.99
Taming Big Data with Apache Spark 4 and Python - Hands On! (2026)
4.5 (18,297 Reviews)
Provider: Udemy
Time: 8.8h
$139.99
Mastering the System Design Interview (2026)
4.6 (15,450 Reviews)
Provider: Udemy
Time: 5.2h
$109.99
AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate 2026 - Hands On!
4.7 (13,819 Reviews)
Provider: Udemy
Time: 24.2h
$109.99
More Personal Development courses
10X SKILL UP Fast: Cut Your Learning Time in Half PLAYBOOK (2026)
5.0 (795 Reviews)
Provider: Udemy
Time: 7.2h
$59.99
Advanced Hand Mudras Course - Energy Healing Hand Positions (2026)
5.0 (153 Reviews)
Provider: Udemy
Time: 1.6h
$74.99
Modern Parenting: How to Raise Wonderful Kids (2026)
5.0 (111 Reviews)
Provider: Udemy
Time: 7.2h
$39.99
Receive Sacred Andean Codes, Your Munay Ki Wisdom Initiation (2026)
4.9 (4,897 Reviews)
Provider: Udemy
Time: 8.2h
$19.99
Focus Mastery: 10X Your Peak Performance in the AI Era (2026)
4.9 (1,873 Reviews)
Provider: Udemy
Time: 9.3h
$11.99
Reviews
By Kajal Bhattad on 7/9/2026
Feeling empowered because he covered such important basics that we usually miss. This is now added to my favorite courses on UDEMY.
By Toaha Siddique on 10/27/2025
Talks about some stuff probably no one will tell you, for this reason I give this course a 5 star.
By Mubarak. Musse on 7/18/2025
The final part contains more practical advice. I was hoping that if it were the first thing, not sure which part comes first: the behavioural interview or the technical interview?
By Daniel Pasin on 6/25/2025
Thank you for your insights, Frank. It is reassuring to hear these things from someone who came from a non-traditional background. It is good to know that it isn't all about what degrees you have, but more importantly what you have done previously.
By Steve Ligon on 1/2/2025
This presentation is spot on, and has really opened my eyes as to what I need to do to gain employment.
By Caio Giffoni Ferreira Gomes on 5/13/2024
Frank is a really good teacher!
By Anonymized User on 2/18/2024
Very helpful and short and sweet to the point.
By Parthipan Ganesan on 2/17/2024
Excellent advice. Strongly recommended. I am retraining myself to land in a better place.
By Jed Jones on 1/3/2024
Frank's content is always top notch.
By Anonymized User on 9/12/2023
good intro, thank you
Quality Score
No CourseDuck member has rated this course yet. Taken it? Give each part a thumbs up or down.
Overall Score : 94 / 100












