My learning journey back to coding — how the John Lewis Partnership helped me get back into engineering
Written by Ali Phipps — Front end Engineer and former Delivery Lead
In the last 2 years I made a significant decision to change my career path back to engineering here at John Lewis from a non technical role. This post details my journey, why I decided to change, and the support I’ve received from JLP to become a front end engineer working on johnlewis.com.
Starting Out
I’ve worked at the John Lewis Partnership for 16 years. During that time I’ve worked across a number of different teams. I started straight out of University as a graduate developer by writing COBOL on the mainframe, through technical roles in specialist areas like data warehousing and Analytics teams. Then for the past 10 years I’ve worked as part of the John Lewis Digital team, seeing the website grow to billions of revenue per year and 60% of total sales at John Lewis.
Compared to most people working in the IT sector I’ve worked at one company for a very long time. Many people move roles or companies multiple times in their career, what has kept me from doing the same? Certainly working for a company that is both outside the normal shareholder driven ownership model and a brand that people trust and love has its draw, but the main reason that I stayed is that I have continually been supported to both challenge myself with opportunities to grow and work on cool stuff with interesting people.
Working as a Delivery Lead
For eight years working on johnlewis.com I had a non technical role, working on projects and products as a Project Manager and then a Delivery Lead. During this time I set up and worked in some excellent teams, taking lessons from outside the company to improve our agile and lean ways of working. JL Digital has always been a great place to work, our product teams full of smart folks both product and techies working together to deliver cool stuff for our customers. This period was really enjoyable in my career, as I transitioned from a traditional project manager into a servant leader delivery lead able to coach my teams to a high degree of agile maturity. I had a great relationship with the leadership team in both engineering and product, and was always supported to take steps in each new role, increasing complexity and responsibility as my skills and experience matured. I also got to work with some great people from outside JL, like Dan North and Liz Keogh who came in to help JL with their digital transformation. I tried to take as much from working with them into my own skills and knowledge, to grow my coaching skills. The softer side of development and delivery I found fascinating, and I loved learning about how to support and coach the teams I’ve worked with.
Time for a change
While working as a Delivery Lead I considered my next step in my career. I was always known for being interested in the technical side of the work we did, and involved myself in the architecture decisions alongside the developers and architects I worked with. I felt myself trending back to this even as I worked with the leadership team as I became more senior. The problems you solve as you get more senior are people problems, and when you really move things on it can be amazing. I learned skills to be effective in that environment, but I realised that it didn’t give me the same job satisfaction as working in a product team shipping cool stuff to delight customers.
I was feeling like I needed to change, but wasn’t sure what that next step would be.
I started to experiment in my own time with web development. My previous coding experience was quite niche, I was working on large data warehouse projects and with ETL type tooling, nowadays this would be called data engineering. So while I had experience of general software development, OO and web development were new for me to get hands-on experience. I had worked in teams where techniques like TDD and CI/CD were used, and understood how they could benefit a team’s successful delivery but not had experience of doing them for myself.
This felt like a large barrier for me to overcome, so for the time being I was happy exploring this as a hobby. It didn’t feel like a viable career move at this point. Also other priorities like starting a family meant I needed a level of stability at this point in my life.
Back to School
The JL Technical Profession started a new initiative to encourage more focus on the engineering skills at JL, and a pathway back to tech for non techies was created to help satisfy the increasing demand for engineers in JLP. There were a number of options routes for this, all however were given with substantial training support, and not having to drop down levels of seniority. This was an amazing opportunity, not many companies I think would invest in their people like this. While the move was really scary, I thought about what to do, and I decided if I didn’t go for it now I would never get the opportunity again.
The route I decided to take was to go on a 3 month sabbatical and attend a coding bootcamp called Makers Academy. This is a well known bootcamp that gives a great grounding in modern software development. What I liked most about this program was that alongside the core tech skills like TDD, it aimed to set you up for continuous learning through your career. One of the course’s goals was ‘I could teach myself anything’. The JL tech profession funded this in full, which was pretty awesome. Not many companies would invest in their employees like this.
While intense and hard work, having three months in a different culture was a fantastic experience. I felt fully renewed and excited to get back to work to try out my new skills. I bonded with my fellow course mates and we had a great time learning the skills to take into our next career. Thankfully despite the pandemic breaking just as we finished, all have found roles in the tech industry!
I’m an Engineer!
I started back from makers at the start of 2020, After dabbling with back end I decided to make Front end my focus and joined a team working on the search results page. The learning curve was incredibly steep, going to work on a critical front end application of considerable complexity was a shock. I was supported by some great team members who gave me the space to learn alongside them. We also had a community of makers in JL who were on similar journeys together. By having a safe space to try stuff out, my skills and experience improved, and we could work on things that we weren’t able to in our day jobs.
It’s now 2 years since I’ve made the move. I feel like I have a good foundation of front end experience to be a full team contributor to the work we are doing (although imposter syndrome never goes far away!). The knowledge and skills I’ve worked up before as a delivery lead are hugely valuable and relevant too. Helping coach good agile practices hopefully means I make a rounded contribution to the team’s I work in.
I’m really enjoying my working life. The feedback loop of solving the technical challenges and seeing your work appear on the website is highly rewarding. I’m pleased I made the jump and thankful to the JL Tech profession for investing in me to get to this point. Looking forward to the next challenge and my new career as a software developer.
At the John Lewis Partnership we value the creativity of our engineers to discover innovative solutions. We craft the future of two of Britain’s best loved brands (John Lewis & Waitrose).
We are currently recruiting across a range of software engineering specialisms. If you like what you have read and want to learn how to join us, take the first steps here.
