I have made a few career changes in my life and I feel like the one that I am undertaking right now is the most deliberated decision I have made in a long time. In the time of the pandemic, many people have been forced to think about the decisions that they’ve made and decide whether to keep doing it or not. “Pivot or perish?”, was on my mind a lot in 2020.

Sure, I was lucky enough not to be suddenly let go of like so many others during the first year of the pandemic, but my industry was facing massive changes in the face of the pandemic, but with my contract only being renewed year to year even in the best of times, I knew I needed to make a decision. So with that, I decided to make the move from the once safe higher education industry (in Australia anyway) to the global and somewhat futureproof technology sector. Although the decision to earnestly get into the technology sector was seemingly a quick one, it was actually something that I have been gestating with for the last couple of years.

One of my biggest passions over the years has been my love of music and my joy of sharing it with other people; namely DJing. By throwing myself headfirst into the electronic music/DJ community over the years I have met an awful lot of fantastic people and found a really rewarding hobby and go to know myself better. During that time back in 2017, one of my good DJ friends was working for a large event’s company. Despite possessing little actual experience in web development, I’m not sure why, but that friend asked me to update the company’s website with some new touring and artist information. With nothing to lose and much to learn I decided to undertake the challenge — and I found out that I loved it! Luckily it was a WordPress site which is much easier to build than building a website from scratch. I was able to implement most of the required content for the company, but I had to ask my friend who is a veteran front-end developer how to solve a few of the more complicated issues for me, at the time. I really enjoyed it and was surprised that I started to recall some knowledge of HTML from my Blogger website in my university years. During university, I used to drive cabs part-time to fund my tuition. I also used to practice writing as a hobby and wrote about being a part-time cabby; the interesting characters that I met and my thoughts at the time. (I wish I could find that blog, I recall writing a lot of interesting stories).

With the ‘project’ successfully completed, I was pumped and wanted to do more. It was actually at this point I started to self-study and actually decided that I wanted to become a web developer. Like many, I joined Colt Steele’s terrific Udemy course, I started to dabble in the curriculum of the amazing freeCodeCamp and also started doing the JavaScript drawing lessons on Khan Academy. All of these resources are still amazing today and I really used to enjoy spending my lunchtimes on campus (my workplace) studying coding. However, I eventually got too drawn into my day job then eventually stuck in tutorial hell and the momentum stopped in early 2019.

I have made a few different career changes in my life. From becoming an apprentice chef when I was straight out of high school to going to university to become a lawyer after that, to later rediscovering my love of educational environments and working at universities for a number of years, I have always recognised that the world changes around us and that there is no shame in readjusting and choosing another path in life. Although I realised that the recent years going from contract to contract at different universities were some of the most joyous times that I have had in my working life, I soon realised that I ought to pivot from higher ed to something more sustainable, lest I be swinging from one contract to another or worse, long-term unemployed.

So around the end of 2020, I started my studies again with renewed vigour and began to code again as if there was no Plan B — this time I will follow through with it and make it stick. It’s not easy, but I accept that. There is no progress without struggle.¹ During the pandemic, many of us have or still are experiencing what Victor Turner calls a liminal period — a time of intense human transition. I have given up my previous occupation and identity in higher education and have taken on a new path to become a technologist. Although I’m not quite there yet, I know I will get there eventually. The process is a bit unsettling; letting go of who you once were, in a way, to become another person.² Learning to code can also be very grindy and it might take an awful lot of practice for it to ‘click’.

“The individual who emerges on the other side of a liminal event is not the same as the individual who entered it. This process is unsettling.”

I feel like the rub is twofold. Firstly, I feel it entails consolingly myself that I am headed in another direction and not the same person I was anymore and secondly the gradual process of training my brain to think differently as a developer. Resoundingly, one of the strongest messages that I have picked up is that as a career changer, is that you should embrace your identity during your career change. Not only do you possess plenty of transferable skills and experience from different industries, but these also might give you a little bit of spice to stand out from other candidates.³

I’m blown away by global communities of newbie coders who support and encourage each other every day. Whether it is the discussion board on freeCodeCamp, Scrimba’s discord, various YouTubers or various meetups in different cities around the world where veteran developers rub shoulders with newbies like myself and offer their support and mentorship. It really is something else. With each new concept I learn or helpful person that I meet in the global community, the more I feel that I have made the right choice about diving into tech. As part of my journey, I took a free course by Le Wagon Tokyo who held a Coding for Beginners course where students learn the basics of Ruby.⁴ I was impressed with their mantra — “be comfortable being uncomfortable”, which pretty much sums up the mindset one ought to have when making such a big career change and in that liminal state of neither here nor there.

I look forward to a future where I will not be seeking a contract renewal or a new job every 6 or 12 months (touch wood). The opportunities in the technology sector are plentiful. Recent reports have said that with the advent of the pandemic, technology sector roles, which were already in high demand have only increased by orders of magnitude, as the world adapted to 2020 and beyond.⁵ Furthermore, technology skills such as development, digital marketing, UX or cloud computing solutions are also in demand in traditional industries, where companies may want to employ someone with such skills in order to adapt to the current climate, innovate or keep relevant in the modern age. Being a technologist means that you are always learning new things, ways of thinking and how tech can influence and solve some of the worlds most interesting or niche problems — with this new, ever-evolving mindset and skills arsenal, I’m excited to see how this changes me so that I can leave my own dent in the universe.

¹ blackpast.org/african-american-history/1857.. ² sapiens.org/culture/pandemic-liminal-state ³ builtin.com/career-development/career-change ⁴ ruby-lang.org/en ⁵ zdnet.com/article/developer-jobs-these-are-..