My career change in the time of a pandemic PART II
Making the leap
“Swiping Right” on a new career
As the months went by, my passion and curiosity for coding grew. Doing all sorts of exercises and solving problems fit my thirst for new knowledge and new exciting adventures.
I realised very quickly that coding and management in hospitality showed similar traits, with creative problem-solving being an important one of them. To that list, we can also add knowing how to communicate amongst the team, knuckling down to meet deadlines and enjoying a nice cold beer after work with your teammates.
It also proved to be a great fit for me as management and customer experience — two bricks in my wall of skills — are two pivotal cornerstones of certain parts of the tech world. Therefore I’d like to think web development suits me very well with my dynamic personality and previous experience that could come in handy for any company.
Instead of just waiting around during lockdown, I basically spent most of my day on freecodecamp.com, CodeCademy and Udemy, delving into the riches of Javascript, HTML & CSS. It was all I ever wished for and more. It was fun and especially, after having spent many years in hospitality and especially having felt like part of the cast of “Groundhog Day” over the last two years, it rebooted my brain and my thought process.
As an added bonus, coding opened a new channel of discussion between my partner and I (who has been working in web development for 3 years already). We are now able to share our mutual coding exploits, instead of her just trying to talk about her day and me thinking she is speaking, coincidently, in code.
Needless to say, she helped me a great deal in my understanding of all things JavaScript.
It was maybe one month into my discovery of coding that I took a risk and I chose to enlist in a Web Development Bootcamp in Paris. Quite spontaneously, I went with my gut to negotiate my departure from my current employment in hospitality and pursue my newfound passion.
As I couldn’t afford to spend too much time or money on starting long-term studies and was already used to fast-paced learning environments, I looked into bootcamps. I ended up choosing Ironhack’s 10-week long immersive course in Full Stack Web Development, for its focus on Javascript.
Having spent several months before the bootcamp learning as much as I could to be fully prepared for the woes of the emotional rollercoaster that these next laborious weeks were going to bring, I managed to successfully complete the syllabus and so, certificate in hand, my next step was to find my first job in web development. The last step in my career transition.
Facing challenges from the get-go
Job hunting is already difficult enough but adding the financial context’s hurdles into the mix just makes it even harder.
Full disclosure: At the time of writing this story, I still haven’t found a job.
Not for lack of trying though. I have applied to numerous jobs. Some companies have provided answers (negative or positive, automated or not), many have not. I came close several times, but without success in finalising (usually down to the experience).
However, it is important to stress that I’m far from being the only one in this predicament. In fact, I am one of many thousands who decided to change careers during this time. Evidently, everyone has a different motive- job loss and seizing the opportunity to explore something new with all the free time during lockdown (like myself) are two big reasons.
Now, having taken the time to think and to discuss this subject with some people from the tech industry, I have boiled it down to what I believe are the most interesting headlines that are perhaps taken for granted.
Businesses in financial crisis
The pandemic has obviously hit millions of businesses around the globe, which left many tech companies with having to hire less or not at all. The few companies that still hire, are looking for much more experienced candidates as they don’t have the resources to train juniors. It is understandably easier for them to hire interns (for a fraction of the cost) or experienced coders instead of hiring someone fresh in the world of coding.
The “funnel effect”
As stated earlier, there are many people in France that have done what the French call “Reconversion Professionnelle” (professional reconversion, or career change). We might not be all heading towards web development but the fact remains that the unemployment systems of France are pushing people towards jobs that can be performed remotely and safely, during the pandemic. Naturally, a lot of job seekers are inclined to choose the exciting world of tech, similarly to what I did.
This now leaves a huge number of “juniors”(newly trained/certified people starting in tech) looking for jobs. Now, therein lies the rub- more supply and less demand (as mentioned in the previous point) equals a large amount of people going up for the same jobs, leaving recruiters with sometimes hundreds of resumés for their limited job openings. Ergo, the “funnel effect”- lots going in, but only slowly coming out.
Bootcamps are maybe not as magical as they used to be
Over the years bootcamps have allowed people of different experiences and different ages to make their way into tech.
Why not? Instead of having only born and bred coders who show crazy technical skills but who sometimes lack experience beyond the screen, companies hire people from various backgrounds to create a pool of employees with different ways of thinking and problem-solving.
This is how a lot of startups have made significant progress- by hiring a variety of profiles.
The concept of web development bootcamps is therefore genius, as they help people quickly transition from one sector to another.
However, in 2020, many people were pushed into these bootcamps producing varied levels of successful coders by overloading cohorts/sessions (more on that perhaps in a different story).
The issue now is that you have a lot of fresh career switchers being told that there are many companies in the world looking for their personality and looking less at their lack of experience in web development. This is true, but in smaller and less frequent numbers.
Companies are struggling with their current workload and team sizes to meet deadlines. If you now add newcomers to the mix that are still astronomically far from mastering the company’s tech stack, the senior staff will not have time to balance on-boarding, mentoring, reviewing code AND completing their own work. It’s just too much!
I can understand that, given the current pandemic, these “newbies” getting certified by bootcamps can be a hard bargain versus experienced programmers. Nonetheless, we should still be grateful for the existence of intensive bootcamps, especially for people like me who are looking at starting afresh without necessarily enrolling in long-term studies.
Obviously, there are lot more factors to take into account on top of the three points I described above, but they all amount to the same conclusion:
It’s harder to find a job in web development in the time of the pandemic. There is not necessarily a whole lot you can do about it. However, it is up to you to fit the most appetising profile for recruiters.
There are 3 simple things you can do for that: keep on learning new skills, work on your visibility and, never give up.
