Start here
This points you at one route. It is a signpost, not a test — you can ignore it and browse.
Three questions
1. Have you worked in tech before?
If no, start at Help Desk / IT Support. It is the only role here that reliably hires people with no prior tech job.
2. Already doing help desk or support?
You have two realistic moves: Cloud Support if you like systems, or SOC Analyst if you like investigation.
3. How much can you spend?
Nothing, for a long time. Every route starts with free material, and we tell you the exact point where paying starts to be worth it — with the arithmetic shown.
Or just pick one
Every route we have researched, grouped by family. Each one is free to follow end to end.
IT, Systems & Cloud
- Cloud Engineer You design and run the infrastructure that applications live on, in code rather than by hand.
- Cloud Support You keep cloud infrastructure running and help engineers and customers when it misbehaves.
- FinOps / Cloud Cost Engineer You find out why the cloud bill doubled, and you make it stop.
- Help Desk / IT Support You are the person who fixes it when someone's computer, login or printer stops working.
- Network Administrator You keep the network up — switches, routing, wifi, VPNs, and the mystery of why one floor can't print.
- Platform Engineer You build the paved road other engineers ship on, so they stop reinventing the same pipeline.
- Solutions Architect You decide how the pieces fit together, and you have to defend the decision to people paying for it.
- Systems Administrator You keep the servers, accounts and services running that everyone else quietly depends on.
Cybersecurity
- Application Security Engineer You stop vulnerabilities from being written, rather than finding them after they ship.
- Cloud Security Engineer You make sure the cloud account nobody is watching is not the way in.
- Digital Forensics & Incident Response You work out what happened after a breach, in enough detail that it stands up later.
- Governance, Risk & Compliance Analyst You turn a security standard into things the organisation actually does, and prove it did them.
- Identity & Access Engineer You decide who can do what, and you make sure nobody quietly accumulates more than they need.
- Penetration Tester You are paid to break in, with permission and in writing, and then explain exactly how.
- SOC Analyst You watch the alerts, work out which ones matter, and investigate the ones that do.
- Security Analyst You work out what an attacker did, or is doing, and write it up so someone can act.
AI / Machine Learning
- AI Evaluation & Red Team Specialist You find out what a model does wrong before its users do, and measure it rather than guessing.
- AI Governance Specialist You work out whether the organisation is allowed to ship the model, and on what conditions.
- Conversational AI Developer You build the assistant, and you make it behave when a user says something you never planned for.
- AI Infrastructure Engineer You run the clusters models train and serve on — GPUs, schedulers, networking and the things that fail at 3am.
- AI Platform Engineer You build the internal platform other teams use to ship AI — so they do not each reinvent serving, tracking and deployment.
- AI Product Engineer You own whether an AI feature is actually good for the people using it — not just whether it runs.
- AI Research Engineer You build and run the experiments researchers design — training the models, not writing the papers.
- AI Research Scientist You originate the ideas — formulate the problems, run the experiments, publish the results.
- AI Safety Researcher You work on making advanced AI systems behave as intended — interpretability, alignment, evaluation.
- AI Security Engineer You find and close the ways AI systems get attacked — prompt injection, data poisoning, model theft, unsafe tool use.
- AI Software Engineer You are a software engineer who builds features on top of AI models — the AI is a component, not the product.
- AI Solutions Architect You design how AI systems fit together — and decide what not to build.
- Data Engineer (AI/ML) You build and run the pipelines that get data to the models, reliably and on time.
- Distributed Systems Engineer You build systems that stay correct when machines fail, networks partition and clocks disagree.
- GPU / CUDA Engineer You make code run fast on GPUs — writing and tuning the kernels that everything else waits on.
- LLM Engineer You build applications on top of large language models — retrieval, agents, evaluation and serving.
- MLOps Engineer You make machine learning repeatable — training, tracking, deploying and watching models in production.
- Machine Learning Engineer You take models from a notebook to something that runs reliably in production, and keep it working.
UX & Product Design
- Accessibility Specialist You make sure the product works for people the team forgot to think about.
- Developer Advocate You help developers succeed with a product, and tell the company the truth about what is wrong with it.
- Product Designer You decide what gets built and how it should work, then draw it clearly enough to build.
- Technical Product Manager You decide what the team builds next, and you own the consequences of being wrong.
- Technical Writer You make complicated things understandable, in writing, for someone in a hurry.
- UX Designer You decide how a product should work for the person using it, then prove the decision with evidence.
- UX Researcher You find out what people actually do, rather than what everyone assumes they do.
Software Engineering
- Backend Developer You build the part users never see — the APIs, the data layer, and everything that has to stay up.
- Desktop Application Developer You build software that installs on a machine and works whether or not the internet does.
- DevOps Engineer You make shipping software boring — automated, repeatable, and safe to undo.
- Frontend Developer You build the part of the software people actually touch — and make it work on their device, not just yours.
- Full-Stack Developer You build the screen and the thing behind it, and you own the whole feature.
- Mobile Developer You build the app on the phone, where the network drops and the battery matters.
- QA / Test Automation Engineer You find out what breaks before a user does, and turn that into a test that runs forever.
- Site Reliability Engineer You keep the thing running at scale, and you use software to do it rather than heroics.
Data
- Analytics Engineer You turn raw tables into the trustworthy, documented ones everyone else queries.
- BI Developer You build the dashboards people actually run the business from.
- Data Analyst You answer questions with data, and explain the answer to people who will not read your code.
- Data Architect You decide how an organisation's data is shaped before anyone builds on it.
- Data Engineer You build the pipes that get data from where it is made to where it gets used, reliably, every day.
- Database Administrator You keep the database fast, backed up, and awake at three in the morning.
- Data Scientist You answer questions with data that nobody could answer by looking at a dashboard.
Infrastructure & Advanced Computing
- IoT Developer You connect physical things to software, and deal with the fact that they lose signal.
- Computer Vision Engineer You make software understand what is in an image, reliably enough to act on it.
- Embedded Systems Engineer You write the software that runs on a chip with no screen, no operating system and 64KB of memory.
- HPC Engineer You make scientific code run across thousands of cores without falling over or wasting half of them.
- Robotics Software Engineer You write the software that makes a machine perceive where it is and move without hitting anything.