How I went from earning £20k-100k by doing a coding course

Could you tell me a bit about your career and background?

I have a degree in Classics and started my career in the university’s fundraising office: firstly by making the fundraising calls, then managing the call centre. When I graduated I couldn’t get a job in the UK so instead I moved to Shanghai where I interned in event management. I spent that summer putting together hotel opening ceremonies and when I came back to London, I moved into hotel recruitment. I love love love hospitality, but I wasn’t the biggest fan of the process driven routine of recruitment. I’m a now a software engineer currently working for a management consultancy.

How did you pivot into hotel recruitment?

It just so happened that some guys I knew in Shanghai were looking for someone to run their recruitment start up for them, and so I took on the job as General Manager. I started in sales and marketing, and it very quickly became an everything role: from sales meetings, strategy and even tax return filing.

What went wrong and how did that lead you to training as a developer?

Slowly I realised, as an online company, outsourcing our development work was costing a fortune. In an urgent bid to cut costs I started looking into coding myself. I found a passion for it and before I knew it, I was resigning from my job and enrolling in coding bootcamp! The course was 3 months long - plus another month to work on career stuff and find a job. I chose General Assembly for the platform, and I couldn’t recommend them enough - they are globally well regarded in the software development business.

How did you feel resigning and starting fresh?

It was so scary, particularly because I was at an age where my friends and peers were beginning to get their first manager roles, and there I was choosing to start again at the beginning. But I had to remind myself that I was only 5 years into my career with at least another 40 years to go, so I needed to ensure I’d found a career I love! With that said it was still a big risk. A lot of people thought I was crazy, particularly as I’d never really shown an interest in computers before. But my family and my boyfriend (now husband), encouraged me to go after things I was passionate about, and I worked hard to ensure it all worked out.

What happened once you completed the course?

Right now, I’m very lucky to live in Singapore and work for the international brand that hired me straight out of coding camp. My salary doubled straight out of bootcamp compared to pre-coding, so I was able to pay for my course very quickly. I earned around 20k then and now I earn over 100k. A lot of people contact me on LinkedIn asking how I did it, and in truth it was a bit of a slog. I almost gave up a few times but I treated finding a job like my full time job. I had a daily routine of looking for jobs, writing cover letters and doing code tests. In fact, the day before I got hired I remember crying on the sofa to my sister. I had so many companies try to persuade me to take unpaid internships to build experience but I couldn’t afford to do that given how much time I’d been out of work and the money I’d paid for my course.

Do you have any advice for others?

Sometimes things need to get really bad for other things to improve. If everything had continued to be fine at the startup I would never have been forced to try something radical, which ended up changing my life for the better. Also, as I mentioned, the thing that really encouraged me to make the move was that you will probably work for about 50 years, so if you’re not happy even 5 years in then you really ought to change path. Even if you’re 40, you still probably have over half your career to go - so it’s never too late to make a change.