And you, what do you want to do when you grow up?
What do you want to do when you grow up?
We have all heard this question at least once in our life as a child, as a teenager, or after graduating high school. The possible answers are endless but often difficult to find.
It took me more than 30 years to find my answer.
When I was a kid, I answered it like a lot of little boys of my age: astronaut, professional soccer player. As a teenager, it was in music or movie FX that I dreamed of working.
But none of this has (yet :p) come true and eventually life decided for me, while waiting for me to find my way.
In 2001, like many young people in their twenties, I don’t know what I want to do, and “Baccalauréat” (high school) degree in hand, I decide to go to university. By default, I start a “DEUG” (French general university degree) in English but I stop only a few months later. University was not for me and I did not see what this diploma could bring me.
Then follows a period of jobs, “just to pay bills”. As a temp worker, I have been a mover, worked in the archive basements of large administrations, even advised La Poste users when France switched to the Euro currency in the early 2000s.
It was by chance that I got my first indefinite term contract, “International mobility advisor” at Pôle Emploi. More precisely, asPôle Emploi did not yet exist, I was hired by the OFII, which works in partnership with the ANPE on this international mobility department.
Even then, if I had been asked, I still wouldn’t have known what I would like to do when I grew up. But a first indefinite term contract at 22 years old is a chance to be seized.
The work is very interesting, very rewarding. I am surrounded by colleagues who are often passionate, sometimes inspiring, and in any case always benevolent. Supporting people with expatriation projects all over the world, learning about cultural differences in work, legal obstacles, immigration procedures, job search — the variety makes this work anything but monotonous.
And this is my first “real job”.
The years go by and I forget to ask myself the question, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” After almost 13 years in this position, I leave. And the trigger for change also comes a little by chance.
I have always been a bit of a geek, interested in new technologies, current innovations, and particularly in IT and web technologies.
I write code, I learn to create web pages with HTML / CSS. It’s fun, it feeds my curiosity. I continue, I dig a little more, until one day, I create and put online a website to present a house for rent: www.la-nichee.fr .
I am 33 years old, it is a revelation. I have my answer: “When I grow up, I want to be a web developer!”
Everything is then linked. I get information to do retraining. I want to go through a “CIF” (Individual Training Leave), but the funding takes 3 years to be accepted. During this time, I train myself by finding online resources (OpenClassrooms; Grafikart; developpez.com among others), I even create my own business to start working in parallel of Pôle Emploi on small projects. After more than a year of self-training, I became a Mentor at OpenClassrooms.
Finally, the funding for my training is approved. I leave Pôle Emploi for 6 months and make my project a reality. Three months of training at CNAM, followed by three months of internship at Augmenteo, an augmented reality studio, as a PHP / Symfony developer. This first internship confirms my choice, my desire to become a developer, and I do my best to find my first developer contract following my internship, so as not to have to return to Pôle Emploi.
It goes quite well in the end. I started my first contract as a developer in September 2017 at Linkvalue, almost 4 years after having this “revelation”. In addition to allowing me to give life to my retraining project, to finally be able to proclaim myself a developer and start a new career, I discovered a very different world.
Having mainly known large French administrations until then, I discover the world of tech, its approach to teamwork and very different management style, especially at Linkvalue, a company whose organization is inspired by the movement of “entreprises libérées”.
I am equal to the technical challenge, the environment is healthy, everything is poised to progress and grow. In 2020, like many, I am living a somewhat special year, punctuated by confinements and limited activity. I take advantage of the start of the year and the first confinement to do a “VAE” (Validation of Acquired Experience) and obtain a Back-end Developer (PHP / Symfony) diploma from OpenClassrooms.
At the end of the year, during my second period of limited activity, I begin to ask myself a few more questions. Eventually the planets align. After having trained independently on OpenClassrooms, having been a mentor, and having obtained a diploma, I apply to become a backend developer.
I had always had my sights set on this business. The journey of OpenClassrooms’s two co-founders, Matthieu Nebra and Pierre Dubuc, and their mission made me curious. But when I was first intrigued by OpenClassrooms, I was too junior and it was out of the question for me to move to Paris.
OpenClassrooms now offers a full remote policy — among other benefits — and, with my diploma in hand, I feel more qualified to apply. In February 2021, I finally join the OpenClassrooms team.
Today, I am very happy to have taken the plunge a few years ago. I have no regrets, and if I had to do it again, I would do it again a hundred times!
When I was over 30 and finally found my answer to the question “What do you want to do when you grow up?”, it was mainly because I allowed myself to experiment. I learned with the resources I found and created my first web pages without asking anyone for anything. And it was by doing that that I was able to understand what I wanted to do, that I could make it my job.
If there is a first lesson to be learned, it is that there is no single answer to this famous question. Ask me the question again in ten years, the answer will probably have changed.
The second lesson is: if it is possible once, it is possible several times.
So today, nothing prevents me from imagining other careers, other perspectives, because I know that whatever our age or our background, everything can be learned.
Today, I have two certainties about my professional future:
- I am perfectly fulfilled in what I do today and I hope to do so for many years.
- Backend developer is not my last job. Perhaps my next job doesn’t even exist at the time I’m writing this.
To conclude, retraining taught me a third lesson and maybe the most important: experiment and persist! To those who are looking for themselves, who do not have the answer to this famous question, here is my advice: experiment as much as possible, test, find out what really interests you. If a subject makes you curious, dig in, try, you may be on your way to finding your next job!
