Tech Transition — from the beginning.
In the last year I decided to abandon my career in project management to move into the tech industry, with the hope of becoming a Software Developer. Coming from a non-technical background, this hasn’t been the easiest of tasks, but I’ve been employed as a Software Engineer since September 2019. I’m learning how to navigate a brand new career path, being the only non-male on the engineering team, and not necessarily having a clue what I’m doing at least some of the time. Career changes are challenging and exhausting, but don’t let that stop you.
Today marks the end of my fifth month as a Software Engineer. To put that in context, before starting my current job I worked in project management in Higher Education for five years. Whilst this did involve some degree of data management, I spent the bulk of my time trying to keep groups of teenagers engaged and entertained on ridiculously long residential programs. I also worked for a while managing the university’s International Exchange activities, so essentially more project co-ordination.
In terms of qualifications, I have a Bachelor’s degree in International Politics and Intelligence Studies, and a Master’s degree in Glaciology. So when I was asked in my interview for my current role if I’d consider myself “a whimsical person”, based on my education and career history, you can sort of understand why…
My point is, my background is not in tech.
It seems like everyday there’s another article popping up about the lack of gender diversity in the tech industry. Did you know that only 19% of tech workers in the UK are women?? I’m currently experiencing this disparity first hand as the only non-male on a team of 14 engineers. So I wanted to write about my experiences and how I’m navigating my new career path.
My tech journey began in a similar way to a lot of other people my age — inadvertently learning HTML to make my MySpace page look badass. And mine had it all, the irritating falling stars that got in the way of everything, the music that was playing from somewhere but with no way to turn it off (because who wanted people to be able to silence your impeccable teenage emo song choices??). I mostly used my newfound power for good, but once I’d figured out how to remove the embedded ads from the code I lifted from other sites, there was no going back. Except… that’s where my computing life paused.
In school we were taught IT. I chose Access databases over Excel for my GCSE project, but I didn’t really get into any sort of querying. I put together some pretty complicated formulas to work out stats in a Geography assignment, but at no point did coding come into the equation whilst I was at school. It just wasn’t something we were ever taught. And I was too busy convincing myself I could become a photographer/rockstar to do much more in my own time. (Spoiler — I became neither of those things).
So that was all for a while. I had very little cause to ever think of coding anything during my undergraduate degree, so my laptop was used solely for essay writing, trying to watch Grey’s Anatomy on dodgy MegaVideo links, and playing DVDs I’d rented from LoveFilm. (I’m enjoying the nostalgia a little here, does it show?).
During my Master’s degree I learnt GIS and Remote Sensing. There was a brief foray into Python and the command line, but the context was never fully explained and I just didn’t understand what we were trying to achieve with it. And context is a big thing for me.
Fast-forward six years or so and I was lucky enough to sneak onto a CodeFirst: Girls HTML/CSS web development course. The courses are run for women and non-binary people, either within companies or for free in universities, and working at a university allowed me to blag a place. My friend Jordan and I swallowed our fears and went along. Quickly we were hooked. A big part of the 8 week program is putting together a website for the course competition. I would be lying if I said Jordan and I took this maybe a little more seriously than we potentially should have…
There were weekends spent in Starbucks battling with Mapbox elements and JavaScript, learning far more than was on the syllabus and probably being more ambitious than was expected. But we built ourselves a pretty cool road-trip site, and learnt a lot more than we had anticipated. The buzz I got from figuring out how to do something that had been eluding us for hours was addictive. The course finished and I wanted more.
Over the next year, I tried to plan what to do next. I started Harvard University’s CS50x course on edx — the materials and resources are fantastic, and I thoroughly enjoyed getting into real coding with C. Then I moved onto learning Python through Codecademy. For a long while my evenings consisted of getting home, making food, then sitting in front of my laptop working through problems until I got too tired to type anymore.
I was debating moving on from my job anyway, but when we found out our department was to be dissolved within the year, that’s when things got real. Since the web development course I’d found something that challenged and motivated me, and despite being called “tech-savvy” for as long as I could remember, I actually began to see it as something I might be able to do.
So I started seriously planning my move into tech.
Starting a new career is incredibly daunting, particularly if you’ve been working in a completely different field for a long time. But if it’s something you want to do there are a lot of resources available out there to do it, and a lot of companies looking to hire people with the right mindset, not just those with the “right qualifications”. I’ve still got a lot to learn in my new industry, but I’ve made it this far.
Read the next part — pairing tests and good rejections.
