I'd love to hear if you've transitioned to tech from another career and why you decided to make the switch!
🌟Your answer may be included in my UndergroundJS keynote talk in August! 🌟
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Oldest comments (41)
Yes!
I was a Rabbi and a Hebrew School teacher before switching to tech!
That's awesome! Why did you decide to switch to tech?
A combination of factors.
The position I had was eliminated and at that point we were already a family so I decided to switch to a career with more financial stability.
I went from being a guitar teacher, musician, and bartender to a developer. Mostly because I needed health insurance but turned out I really enjoyed it.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
I was also a teacher, teaching in primary schools in the UK for around a decade and focusing on music and creative enrichment. It was a rewarding and busy job, where I met and worked with many great people. Ultimately though, I felt that I had reached a far as I could with the job, and the national political landscape for education meant that I knew I would be asked to do things I wouldn't agree with or be able to approach positively.
More pertinently, during a short career break, I had started building a travel blog and was asked by musician friends to help with their digital offering. This led to some time doing both jobs as I felt my way through becoming a web developer.
Eventually I got the chance to try a full time job at an agency (I literally changed a few words on my linkedin profile and, hey presto!) and a couple of years later I'm a dev at a great fintech company, working in React.
I'd say I haven't looked back but of course that's not true, even this week I was at my daughter's school demoing at a STEM careers fair, but it was nice to be able to walk away without the books to mark!