By David Newman
Ankit Virmani had spent five years in consulting when he began eyeing a shift to tech.
“I always thought in my heart that I wanted more technical depth. I wanted to build things rather than sell them too much,” said Virmani, who first moved to the US from India to pursue a master’s degree.
In the first half of 2020, he dove right in.
After wrapping up a day at his full-time job at Deloitte, Virmani would spend three to four hours practicing coding every night, and another two hours reading up about the industry. He also began spending time with people in the field, asking them about real-time scenarios and what challenges they face in their jobs.
“I didn’t want answers from them. I wanted their thought process —how do they navigate through these complex challenges at scale,” he told Business Insider. It didn’t pay off right away. He was rejected by Microsoft and Amazon at different stages of their application processes.
Six months after deciding to switch careers, he landed a role as a data and machine learning specialist at Google’s Seattle office.
Here’s the résumé he used to apply for his job at Google, which pays more than $300,000 a year. BI has verified his employment and compensation.
Virmani is not alone in choosing to sacrifice “typical” résumé decisions. For Shola West, that came in the shape of breaking the “no résumé gap” idea.
West is part of a growing group of Gen Zs who are trying to destigmatize the résumé gap — a period of unemployment between jobs or between education and work.
West previously told BI she took a yearlong break at the start of her career to understand what she really wanted to pursue. She embraced her résumé gap and now works at an advertising agency and runs a career advice side hustle. For Mariana Kobayashi, breaking from the résumé norms meant abandoning the written format altogether.
