Where was I?

I spend time on Twitter, probably too much of it. That said, I get to see quite a lot of discussion about the need for diversity in tech roles. At times you’d almost be willing to believe it’s entirely made up of college graduates in their early 20s, but there are others out there who don’t quite fit the stereotypical image beloved of people who don’t look further than a stereotype.

In a recent Tweet, @shaundai posted that she was due to do a talk covering non-traditional applicants

Been getting some lovely messages from people who are trying to get into tech from other fields.

Next week I’ll be giving my talk on how to stand out as a non-traditional applicant and answering questions about how I moved from sales to engineering while working and parenting FT

I asked if she’d be interested in my own experience as someone who was able to enter the tech sector via a non-traditional route.

Let’s rewind a moment…

In a blog post I put out a while back, I summarised where my efforts to get into the kind of role I wanted had got up to. You can read that at Current Status, but in summary I’d…

• left a well paid job in the Middle East
• completed a a ‘bootcamp’ at General Assembly in London
• had one failed attempt at a role I’d secured immediately after ‘bootcamp’
• suffered a heart attack and needed bypass surgery
• and was working as a sales assisstant in a bicycle shop

…and by this point was heading rapidly for my 58th birthday and it felt to me like I was rapidly heading towards the point where I was going to have to give up on the dream. What this looked like to any prospective employer, was a question I likely didn’t want to know the answer to at that point.

Keeping it all going

All the way through this though, I’d kept up a regular cycle of applying for roles (mainly through online recruitment agencies), making on spec contact with companies that I thought looked interesting to introduce myself, I’d been getting involved in meetups, kept working on my coding skills, and had got involved with CodeYourFuture (CYF).

I’m not sure I ever got a real sense it was having an effect though - every so often I’d get a phone call, 3 or 4 times got an interview, or a code test which didn’t pan out. The most disappointing one was one that told me they were very impressed, but thought I’d be far more suitable for a more senior role coming up, I applied, guess who didn’t get an interview. I kept trying, but it was looking increasingly like it might not happen.

Without giving the game away though, I have now been working at Lancaster University for the last 18 months as part of the team that looks after their student information system. Somehow, despite what must have been weak code text in C# (I didn’t really do C# at that point), they gave me the chance I was looking for, in the kind of organisation I was looking for. It wouldn’t be innaccurate to say that most of the developers on the team have some past connection with the university, mainly as LU graduates. In that sense, I was a non-traditional applicant, I still don’t know of anyone else in our building who learned their skills via a ‘bootcamp’, and I am the oldest on our particular team by a good distance.

The work is complex at times, the system is enormous, but the people there are good, and more than willing to pitch in with advice and help where required. There are plenty of days where imposter syndrome kicks in, but we work it out and I’m still learning - days just fly by, which is something I’d be hard pushed to suggest any of my previous roles did.

Would I do it again?

In a heartbeat. Despite all the hiccups along the way, the costs, the risks, the down moments, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. There are organisations out there who are willing to give people a chance, regardless of whether they have the same ‘look & feel’ as other people on the team. A mix of solid industrial experience (I have a long CV), and what must have been the interview of my life, got me there. Don’t give up, keep pushing, and you just never know…