Another 'retraining into tech' questions....

[solosunflower]

Hello...

Not a AIBU as such, just need some traffic.

I'm looking at retraining into tech, but I've read so much now that my head is a shed! Basically, what is the most suitable route in for a beginner, please? I would ideally like to find a niche area to specialise in and hopefully one day I'll be able to do some freelance work. For reference I have no coding experience. But I am determined and willing to work hard! Can anyone please point me in the right direction. I see there are hundreds of bootcamps, although I don't know which one to choose or where to start. Once I have some direction, I'm sure I'll be fine. Thank you in advance!

I find coding more analogous to knitting than learning a normal language

So with knitting I know the stitches, and I understand the concepts of how and when to increase or decrease or do a yarn over and I understand what the finished piece will look like by looking at the pattern

But I don't know every stitch combination off the top of my head and if I want to do some complicated lace pattern I would have to look it up, but its possible to do that because I understand the underlying concepts

If you are not a knitter then this won't help sorry! But I put off learning a job that needed coding for ages because I am shit at learning languages, but I actually find coding a lot easier to pick up

And this is why I asked the question - people always come onto mumsnet to say go into tech for the six figure salary, but how do people get there?

The only thing I can think is...management tends not to pay as much as niche coding these days - mainly because there are many routes into management that don't require skills the way good developers do.

Also, have you worked your way up through the ranks of a single company?

For context - and please don't think this is showing off, I'm just trying to illustrate - my last job was with a startup as tech lead and primary developer. It was my first job as tech lead, at £60k. When that company died (thanks to underhanded crap from the CEO...it should've survived because the tech worked perfectly and was years ahead of the competition), I looked around and saw that my primary language (Ruby) was in demand, so I priced myself accordingly and now I'm tech lead at a more established small company on £90k.

I have two rules when it comes to salary: never expect salary progression beyond inflation at a single company, and never stay more than 4-5 years in one company. The result of that is, apart from one instance when I deliberately took a significant pay cut because I wanted to build a specific piece of tech, I've always had 20-50% salary bumps when I've moved companies.

If you want something niche I'd be tempted to look at something like Power Apps. Digital transformation is a massive area in a lot of work places, start with some of the free Microsoft courses and see if it interests you.

@xyhere are you the primary carer for your children?

I'm not looking for six figures! Hell no. I'd be very, very happy with 30k a year.

I'm not sure how that's relevant?

But...I arrived on the scene when our daughter was 3. I had a degree and thus higher earning potential, so while she was at primary school, my wife worked part time to be at home with her (and later dropped the job to do a degree), and I was full-time out of the house. When she started secondary school, I switched to working from home full-time so my wife could concentrate on getting a new career started - we never wanted her to be a latch-key kid.

I didn't think you would see it as relevant, but that is because you weren't the primary carer and trying to start a different career. You are giving advice to females that may not have a partner that is willing to support looking after their children whilst pursuing a career change and whilst you are giving advice which is great, you need to bear this in mind.

Of course I bear that in mind, because I was there. Did you miss the part where I was the primary carer for her from 11 onwards? Or do you mean it's because I wasn't a single parent?

The "not relevant" part is that I tried not to stray into the territory of balancing that with caring for children etc; that's absolutely none of my business, and being a single parent is obviously outside of my experience. I've tried to take great care to only give advice about the career and tech side of things. While I don't really care all that much that most folk reading these posts are female (I'm a staunch believer that gender is irrelevant and merit is all that matters when it comes to this, and "women should look after the kids" is a thing that needs to die), I do know how difficult it can be to launch a new career while caring for children because I helped my wife through it.

I think I actually recommended this in the other thread, but once you've got to grips with whatever area of tech you choose, taking freelance jobs is the best way to get a foot in the door and gain experience that can look great on the CV to build to getting a relatively well-paying job, and - admittedly with exceptional time-management - can be done on the side.

It does kind of depend on how much you value sleep, mind. Unfortunately, there's no way round that one :(

Caring for an 11 year old is so not the same as caring for a nursery or primary aged child and I would suggest that your wife might be slightly pissed at you if you tried to suggest that it was.

A female doesn't have to be a single parent to have a partner that doesn't support doing pick up/drop off, taking holiday to care for child during school breaks or illness, or taking children to appointment/clubs/parties sorting out clothes/food/homework/school demands and these are far more labour intensive during nursery and primary than at secondary where children are pretty much independent and just need nudges of direction.

Ignoring that there is gender inequality doesn't magically make it disappear.

A lot of females who want to change into tech are looking to do so to work around childcare and that they don't earn very much at the current time, they are probably time poor and with little flexibility on finances, so contracting probably a no go for many or swapping jobs frequently and the uncertainty/change in routine that that might entail.

Yeesh...look, I get the angle you're coming at. You want to make me out to be ignorant. At what point have I said it'll be easy?

I wasn't ignoring gender inequality at all. I was saying that I don't care for it, and I only care about merit when I'm recruiting (as my track record shows). Way to twist my words there.

Having all those difficulties - which are real, I know since I helped my wife do exactly the same thing - doesn't change the fact that the experience and knowledge still needs to be there before somebody will employ you to do the job.

That's why I've suggested several routes which make it more do-able. The simple fact is that time is required; that's not my fault, I'm only making suggestions.

And, for the record, I wasn't talking about contracting. To my mind, the distinction is that contracting is "you must work this many hours within this time period", whereas freelancing is "you must get this piece of work done". The latter can fit into your life as much or as little as you're willing to, and it's entirely under your control; it doesn't get any more flexible than that.

But yeah, sure. I'm male, so I must be ignorant.

There's always one. I'm out.

Your last comment, dismissing my experience of more than 25 years in tech is why women don't go into tech. No one has twisted your words. I don't need to make you look/accuse you of being ignorant to get my point across.
Also I don't know where you work but I can tell you that the amount of contract female developers from the UK that I have met with children, in the past several decades is...well I can't think of any right now and I've worked for several companies in different sectors in different parts of the country (outside London)...although I recognise that WFH the landscape may shift if women suddenly become more confident, more detached, have less responsibility outside of work.
Freelancing/contracting are the same, you are either employed on a fixed wage no matter how long something takes or are contracted for a fixed term. Either way they are less secure financially and require confidence and require time to keep getting the contracts/jobs. The ongoing learning/development will not be funded by the company who are paying you and you will have to continue to find time/resources to do this.

@Taxistaxing I'm a freelancer and female which is why I made a comment about flexibility. I also have a child under 5. I have always gone after roles with flexibility due to my hobbies before I had a child.

The OP asked about flexibility so I gave her answers.

@xyhere your reply about freelancing and contracting is nonsense. If your work is project based depending on your role and who you are working with will dictate your working hours. A delivery manager or scrum master on a project has less flexibility than a say a front end developer or data engineer on the same project as their roles involve dealing with people more. Also anyone who wants flexibility should avoid start ups.

Sorry, I thought this was one of the ‘make your fortune in tech’ threads!

Hey OP. Given your background I would choose a subject that uses configuration rather than code. This means you learn how to use software with pre- existing 'drag and drop' capabilities rather than coding from scratch.

The data route, Power Bi is a good choice but you need an analytical mindset and I personally wouldn't try this with no pre-existing IT knowledge at home.

information Security could be another route but most of the learning here is the context and some tooling. Many companies use different tools to analyse, monitor and report on security controls and breaches, so the first point is understanding policy.

Programming languages can be learnt but you'd be better off doing this once your in situ. python is ok, largely used in data. C# is taught at university as standard now. Java and .Net are still the most popular in industry by far with C# coming alongside. SQL isn't a programming language as such but is a query tool, so you can run queries against databases source or report on data.

Personally though, I would recommend you look into Salesforce. This is a system that companies use for managing sales leads, customer servicing and all sorts. The UK has a massive shortage of skills and starting salaries can sit at £40k for juniors. salesforce provides access to all the training themselves online, and you could contact Supermums who specialise in training, placements for work experience and eventual recruitment for women, especially those returning to work.

The system is easy to learn, working in a team as an SF Admin your role would be to make changes to existing process flows or design new ones as you learn how SF can be configured.

Another area with skills shortage is OpenText Extreme. This is a document management system used for sending emails, letters SMS etc there are rules around which content, paragraphs should go into what comms, like regulatory statements, or product specific content like your car insurance renewal price. All of these letters these days are auto generated.

And robotics, systems like Blue Prism, again configurable used in organisations for automation of business processes.

So generally I would stay on the 'business systems' side of IT where you don't need a degree or harder tech knowledge. You can learn the system then gain the experience as a junior working your way up the salary level with experience.

I would also add that I wouldn't freelance or contract first (they are both the same thing) you need experience to deliver on your promises, and a company that will support your development growth.

Go big - look at the big insurers, utilities, telephony, finance services firms that will have junior roles available and support your ongoing development as well as good benefits and flexibility for your childcare needs.

It will depend on your role exactly, how long you have worked at the current company for and what your skills are. Do you want to share a bit more?

Uipath is also good for RPA automation, and if things haven't changed you can learn it and get qualified in it for free.

I'd look at the ServiceNow Rise Up programme. There is a boot camp for 13 weeks with interviews at the end.

Scare skill in the market, lots of investment from government and SN themselves. I know clients and partners hiring straight out that boot camp.

I think I am obviously younger than the people who have been in tech for 15 etc years - all I can say is what I see in my organisation, so… the SAs I know have advanced RAPIDLY because things are changing and have changed in the world of business really really quickly.

The two I know who moved into it as junior SA have come from heading up the business tech support function. they’re both I would say 32ish? Re male dominated, I would say getting less so - lots and lots of technical project managers are women, there are at least 2 LGBTQI+ people in the tech team, one woman with little kids.

People work hard during the work day, but I don’t think anyone works outside hours unless there’s a big launch of some kind, and TOIL is a thing. We’re mostly remote and the newest experienced SA who’s been hired is a woman with a small child - she’s had a couple of times on client calls with the small child in the background due to having lost childcare due to the massive amount of sick bugs going around - not ideal, but she just gets on with it and does her work around that, as I do or anyone else does who has little kids and works remotely - sometimes they get sick! You just work together as a team to get through.

Personally op, I think all organisations have their own culture - you can have two big agencies with vastly different cultures, some requiring work out of hours, some not. Some with flexible working, some not. If I were you I’d be looking up interesting organisations in my area (or the area you want to move to), and checking out their websites, what they do, their jobs pages - get a vibe for who the people are you’d be working for, what the roles are, what’s important to you re work life balance. Obvs rhis kind of work is mostly remote now but it’s useful to be say a train ride away if you have client/dept meetings or something.

I think @YoBeaches post is great advice!

Thank you so much! Lots for me to consider.

So opentext exstream developer sounds interesting. How would I go about starting to train into this role, please? Also, where exactly do I search for jobs. I'm guessing Indeed isn't the best place?

I have looked at Salesforce before, and I must admit I'm confused what is is, how I'd train etc. 😶

I've looked on the Supermums website and the Salesforce administrator course is 2k.....

For those systems they will be a bit pricey to get started as they are corporate systems. I think Supermums do a monthly payment scheme.

You can do self training with Saleforce through what they call trail blazing then sit the exams.

For OpenText if you look on their website it has details but again would be a it pricey. Otherwise you could start with self learning HTML and Visual Basic online.

Another one is Salesforce Marketing Cloud, similar to OTE for emails and SMS.

Baby is due in the spring, what's your current plan?

Personally, if you can invest in the learning then you should go for it you will have long term skills with potential to at least double your £30k ambition.

Another option is to go and work in the IT department of a big company on the help desk. Get your foot in the door, learn more about the processes and systems and take a step by step approach.

I didn't need to know a particular language for my current job; some places want you to be familiar with whatever they use, but logic is far more important

@CodeQueen

This is the bit I struggle with. How do you jump from learning coding on youtube tutorials and downloading the software to getting a job? Is it then essential to get some form of qualification?