From Economics to Software; How Frontier’s learning culture enables change
We have previously written about Frontier’s role of being a slingshot that will allow team members to learn at Frontier and leapfrog to a much faster lane in their longer-term career trajectory beyond Frontier.
We have also written about Why Frontier does not require “Economics Degrees” to do “Economics” and, most recently, on how much amazing learning material is available to us online (though the hard part with that is the discipline to do online learning on your own).
So, in this post, we want to bring all of that together with another story. This is the story of our former Tech Lead, Umar — who started life at Frontier as an Economist, self-learned software development and recently left Frontier for a really great job at a software firm in the UK (working remotely in Sri Lanka, too!).
Let’s begin.
This story starts on a day like any other in December 2015, when Amal (our CEO) decided he wanted to learn to code and build stuff. He’d already learned a bit of HTML and CSS using Codecademy, but lacked the discipline to keep going.
But that was not the end of his coding journey. A few years prior to this, another ex-team member from Frontier (also an Economist without any prior software background) joined a coding boot camp in the US for a few months, which also led him to join a US tech firm (again working remotely).
This ex-team member, having known of Amal’s dreams of learning to code, offered to teach Amal to code — Amal, of course, accepted his offer of input, guidance and help.
Since it made sense to do this learning with others at Frontier, Amal extended the offer to the rest of the team, asking if any of them would like to join some weekend classes on coding. Umar joined and they did a few lessons with our ex-team member for about 6 months, learning under his guidance at our office.
Eventually, Amal found it difficult to stay disciplined to self-learn and gave up. Instead, he chose to try to get what he called a “big picture” view of coding — so he could manage a software team with some sense of what that the team was doing (or, at least, felt confident that he could do so) — and supervised Umar as he learned software.
Overtime, Umar realized that his true passion lies in software, and made the risky move of halting a career in economic research. Instead, he learnt coding from online resources, selecting various courses from Coursera to Udemy. He identified areas where his new skills would be useful at Frontier, and with the team input of what would be most useful, started building actual projects for Frontier to use. These projects included building a custom Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software (for managing Frontier’s client data), an online interface for our flagship newsletter Time Twister, supervising and contributing to the development of our new online reports platform “Athena” and working to build these into an ecosystem of projects that would work well together. With Umar’s new skills, Frontier also benefitted in new ways.
After 5 years of working fully in Tech at Frontier, eventually, he felt it was time to leave Frontier to explore greater avenues of learning. This year, he found an amazing job at a start-up in the UK (who share our “Life-first” and remote working culture!) and despite being sad to see him go, the team at Frontier couldn’t be happier for him.
We are always happy when a team member leaves, having used Frontier as a slingshot. This particular case is really great as it particularly validates the underlying core beliefs we have embedded in our culture — which is that of helping all our stakeholders make the best choice, even if it’s not with Frontier.
The cherry on top is that it’s opened a path of possibilities which could work beyond our core skill areas and the non-linear paths that our team members could benefit from. Our values expand conventional possibilities into the unknown, and that’s where contentment lies for Frontier.
