Collection of different career paths -- share your experience
The goal is to create a list of references on how people got into tech. Have you expereincened something that is making your career path unique? -- Then share it with us!
Create a PR and add the link to a blog that describes your career path with a sentence on what is covered in the blog. In the format: [Your name] (Link to your GitHub account) -- Introduction sentence to the blog: [Link] (URL link)
Collection
- Anais Urlichs -- University drop-out, online degree, transtion between industries: Link
Create a PR and add the link to a video that describes your career path with a sentence on what is covered in the blog. In the format: [Your name] (Link to your GitHub account) -- Introduction sentence to the video: [Link] (URL link)
Collection
- Anais Urlichs -- drawing my career path from University to Today: Link
Create a PR and add a paragraph about yourself and your career. Below is an example: (Note that it does not have to be this long)
Hi there, my name is Anais. I started off with a Bachelor in Infomration management. Halfway through the degree I decided to drop out to persue an online degree in Computer Science and to work full time. The following years, I transitioned between different roles at startups in the cryptocurrencies space. While it was tough to gain experience at first, I eventually found my fit as Developer Advocate. After 3 years in the blockchain space, I decided it was time for a change and transitioned industies. This led me to work in the cloud native space.
Your career path does not have to be linear & you definitely do not need a degree to get started and to gain experience. The only thing is you need is people who believe in you and give you a chance.
Howdy, I'm Bradley,and I am a DevOps/ Cloud engineer in the UK.
My story is somewhat interesting as I was never really in to computers much growing up. I moved abroad to India and studied at the American School of Bombay, India from grades 5-7 before returning to the UK to complete years 9-11. This is where I guess you could say that my interest in computers came from. I spent a considerable amount of time speaking to the IT staff as well as our IT teacher who taught me about how a network works, and how a VPN works. I installed Ubuntu 13.04 on my second laptop and started learning HTML and apache (I now touch neither and prefer NGINX)
Since then, I moved back to the UK and finished school.
My plan always was to go in to the RAF - But failed the entrance test by one mark.
I picked up a part-time job working in a warehouse whilst I decided what to do with life. I enjoyed computers alot at this point.
After the summer holiday had finished, I attended the local college whilst attempting to study for my CCNA. With all the money I got from the summer job, I saved up and purchased a 48U server rack and put it in my parents garage. I got a bunch of servers and learnt linux.
As you can tell, I got bored easily. College was boring. I taught my self V-lan hopping and got my account suspended. College was not for me.
In the UK, we have a somewhat decent apprenticeship scheme, so I found one at a local MSP. I worked there for a year and 4 months before getting bored of answering phone calls of people with PHD's but cant use Google Chrome to search.
I was recruited by a company in Texas (Remote employee) as a Junior System Administrator and stayed as that role for around 6 months I think?
I was introduced to the cloud here on AWS. I fell in love with how somewhat easy it was to do most things.
Since then, I attended Aquasec training and am looking at doing some more to better help my company secure their cloud.
Now, I am a DevOps (what eve that means) engineer at a Pet company in the UK, managing their entire GCP stack. It's cool!
My advice to anyone wanting to get in to Cloud or IT, buy a SFF computer (Small form factor) and install linux on it, learn to install stuff like Bookstack - Which is how I learnt.
Heyo! My name's Ranindu. So I started doing Bio-Med in college. Then college nightlife got to me and I dropped out of college. After that, I started off as a waiter, then transitioned into tour guiding for mostly Russian clients, and then switched to the airline industry (customer service), and finally ended up in sales at a tobacco company.
During Rona lockdown, I started off looking into programming with basic Javascript HTML and CSS around mid-2020 from a Udemy course about 6 months in I started applying for jobs, 99.99% rejects of course. Then my current boss gave me a chance and hired me for a local start-up, and even though I started self-learning some front-end dev skills the start-up lacked a DevOps guy. 1.5 years down the line here I am spinning up environments and automating the crap out of everything. Was daunting at first and had no one to really ask for help, other than my boss at times. Mostly using google I've made things work, and always keep going back to them whenever I find a way to improve them. I'm quite new to the feild and have quite the journey ahead of me. Let's gooooo!! 😁
Finally, this is my first ever GitHub contribution! 🤣
This is interesting to me since I'm in tech, which very frequently has people in professions they didn't train for. However, my path was still somewhat non-traditional, even if if you remove the "tech" factor. I grew up in a rural and my family was "barely making ends meet" (in debt). I was lucky enough that my mom was enough of a computer enthusiast that she purchased an older used DOS computer back in the early 90's, which I tinkered with. I did alright in highschool (tested well, but couldn't do my homework, so my grades were average). I ended up not going to college and just did manual labor work. I did some cold calls and door knocking in the early 2000's since I was already programming for a few years and got lucky, since a local computer shop was willing to let me build their site for like $240. They referred lots more business and after that, I got a full time gig working hourly for $10/hr (in 2005...) and that was my big break. So, even though I'm paid far more than my partner (who's a doctor here in the US), I don't have any college debt (again: American) while she, also having grown up poor, has still in excess of $250k of student loans!
I am just very fortunate to both be 1.) already enough of geek to do this for fun and 2.) get paid for it. Shortly after high school, I was panicking because I was only doing manual labor work for $5/hr and even then, part-time. I really wanted a "real office job", but I figured nobody would hire me because I had no college education, but I still had lots of hands on experience doing odd contracting jobs here and there. I really thought I was stuck, for years. Funny enough though, now as a hiring manager myself, I often find the best developers are the self-taught ones and while formal education in the field (Comp Sci and related studies) is great, it's not a predictor of highly skilled employee. Rather, their ability to learn is a far better predictor.