Did you transition to tech from another career?

Yup! I was a social media manager and pretty much disliked everything about it.

My wife was a teacher and she disliked that work also. She randomly fell into engineering thru a funny situation at a job fair she attended, and when I saw how much she liked it, I asked her to teach me some of the basics and then took those learnings and applied them to a bootcamp. Three years later, here I am!

I went from home health care to social media management to developer. My daughter has autism and needed to be homeschooled to make sure she had the best opportunity so I needed something I could do from home. That's where social media management came in. Then I heard about a boot camp in my area so I figured I would take her to see if she had any interest. She didn't and I did. So, here I am.

I just left 10 years of finance, the last 5 years of which as a professional adviser. I’m now a full time developer.

About 20 years ago I started learning Visual Basic, built basic websites, IRC scripts in mIRC and Eggdrop (in TCL), CGI scripts in Perl, more advanced websites in ASP, and currently PHP with a side plate of JavaScript, HTML, CSS.

Most projects I built were just for me but a few years ago I started building a full back-office system for my finance office, to automate tracking of clients, their products etc, so we didn’t miss repeat business, or fall behind on current business, could track KPIs, print reports, and so on.

I lost interest in finance and wanted to do something new but didn’t know what until I realised that throughout every job I’ve ever had, I was always developing something. I knew it would be difficult to find a new career as a developer but luckily I’d just spent over a year building a large admin system that I could use to prove to companies that while I had no commercial experience on my CV (resume), I did have provable code, so I created a demo copy with dummy data.

I’m now in my 5th month as a full time developer and really enjoying my change of career.

I went from the international education industry (as a product owner/project manager) and was fascinated by what the dev team was able to do to create our online courses for teachers to teach English abroad. If I asked them to completely reconfigure a part of the course, they could, and it was amazing! I was so impressed that they were able to constantly learn new technologies and that they were always solving interesting problems. They also took their role of fixing any bugs that came up very seriously - I new that their career and craft were important to them. I now am loving that I get to solve problems and learn new things every day.

I was a teacher. I did teaching for 9 years before I made the switch to tech. I fell out of love with it over the years and eventually realized teaching wasn't a good fit for me anymore. At first I had no clue what to do next. I took a break and did lots of self reflection to figure out what to do next. After doing this, I discovered Skillcrush and eventually wrote my first line of code. That first line of code transformed my life and inspired to make the career change into tech.

6 years ago I was a Service Delivery Manager (think customer service representative, looking after contractual obligations, KPI's and ITSM principles).

I then decided to learn programming in my own time, and then swapped careers in the same company.

Two years ago I was a French Language teacher (French foreign language). I liked it but I wanted to start a new career in a more dynamic and why not in a technical domain, although I have a literary background (Bachelor Degree in History).
I've always found Web fascinating, so I looked for learning Web Development. A year training and internship later, I found my first job as Web Developer. Now I'm working here for seven months and I really enjoy my new career.

I studied recreation management in college. While in school and after graduating I was a ropes course facilitator and camp counselor. I loved it, but I struggled to find full time work in the outdoor/adventure recreation space. After a few years of trying to figure out what I was going to do, I came across online courses for design and development. I spent a year using various online resources to teach myself to code. About a year later, I was hired for my first role as a developer. I have been in that role for just over a year now.

Yep! I was a translator first, then became a language tutor. There were hardly any permanent jobs so I was constantly ‘hopping’ between language schools. Translation jobs were far and between too! About 8 years ago I went to a PD session at the polytechnic where I was teaching English & discovered virtual reality. I was hooked & decided to learn about computers, programming & IT in general. I completed a diploma in IT but couldn’t commit to the coding classes as I was still working full-time in my teaching role. I also had to find an extra role as half of my teaching position just disappeared overnight! I became a part-time learning designer whilst completing the diploma. One year after graduating from the diploma course, I enrolled in a web developer bootcamp. Struggled immensely but kept going. A year and a half later, I was offered a junior dev role at an e-learning company. I’ll be using all of my skills and experience in languages, combining it with my newly acquired coding & technical skills. I couldn’t wish for anything better! Ah, yes, I start my new role in July (2019). It’s been a long journey but worth every step! Thank you for the opportunity to tell my story :-)

I started my career as Architect after uni, supricingly after 5 years of studying that was not my thing.
Firstly I shifted my career to become a 3D Artist as making 3D graphics was my hobby and it paid well at the time. 4 years later Im sitting here as Senior 3D Artist, and about 2 months ago I decided to transition again to become a full time frontend dev. I shifted my career drasticly once, I can do that twice.
Why programming? There are plenty of job offers, it was always quite easy to learn programming languages for me personally, and I feel similiar pleasure working on software compared to making 3D (and maybe playing games?) - its this childish satisfaction feeling when you tell your pc (give input) to do something and it does, and you can see that and you can interract with that on your screen in real time. Amazing. Also I feel like the tech industry will be still growing for years, so I have no good reason to not become a developer.