Career Advice Programming or?

Career Advice
#1

Hi all,

I am looking for just some general career advice. I am 31, Male from the UK (close to London). I am looking for some advice really, I have been working as a Data Analyst for the last 2 and a half years, I have learnt some VBA, SQL and a little bit of R.

I really want to take my career to the next level, I understand this isn’t the ‘traditional programming’ as my experience is more directed towards data science. I am willing to invest into a course providing it gives me value. I have a Marketing degree, which I guess is unrelated, however I did study a statistics module in the degree so it has some relevance.

I am earning around £30-35000 which is not a bad salary for my level of experience, however I really want to be earning around the £50k+ mark which I believe is more than achievable for this career path given the right learning.

So any experience/advice I would greatly appreciate.

#2

Hello @paulr89, welcome to the freeCodeCamp forums!

When it comes to job hunt questions, I usually recommend “going backwards”. If you want a job that pays you that much for that specific field, then go look at the jobs you can apply to that are offering that much.

From there you can see what kind of skills and experience they are looking for. If you already have some experience doing the same kind of jobs, and just want a pay raise I don’t see why you couldn’t apply to a few. Just be sure to setup your resume to “sell yourself” as best as possible for the job at hand.

Now if your missing multiple requirements, you can at least look into some of the ones you are missing to increase your chances, while still applying to the other kind of jobs that work better for you.

I’d focus less on “what courses will teach me everything” and more on “I need to take a course to learn what I need to know”. First part is knowing what you need to know, and then learning it, and gaining some experience. That could be through a course, or multiple courses, or multiple projects, or any combination. Essentially nothing is a one stop shop ;D

Good luck, keep learning, keep applying and keep building!

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#3

Hi,

Yes that makes sense, I guess the hard part is what to learn, javascript does seem to come up a lot, with React etc. So thats probably going to be the route I am goign to take, I just didnt want to waste thousands on a course which is pointless, I would like to get peoples opinion on a course they have done and have themselves had good feedback.

#4

Depending on what kind of jobs your looking at, or going for something like JavaScript, or React is either not necessary, or totally required. If your doing something like front-end web development, its probably more of a requirement to have some experience with those technologies. (especially JS)

So it really depends on what kind of development you want to get into. FreeCodeCamp teaches full stack web development with newer portions using Python for Data Science. This doesn’t mean these are the only paths, but they are some of the more accessible paths.

#5

Just to bear in mind: I would expect, for £50k, to get a programmer with at least 5 years experience who should be highly skilled in one language with at least working knowledge of others ( even with London premium). So just adding basic JS/React knowledge isn’t really going to do much, short term, as it doesn’t really build on what you know atm. You can definitely get to that wage, but focussing on web UI kinda puts you back to square one on that path. There are a lot of jobs but most of those have experience as a prerequisite. This isn’t set in stone, but building on what you currently know may be likely to be more productive career-wise

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#6

If you want to move forwards now without making a financial commitment, I can highly recommend the free CS50 course from Harvard. It’s basically an introduction to computer science, but the concepts and skills I learned have really pushed me forward and made me a much better web developer.

One thing I realised was once you get the hang of the overall concepts, moving between languages is not that difficult. But even so, they do use python on the course which would be useful given you’re interested in data science.

FreeCodeCamp and CS50 compliment each other really well, FreeCodeCamp gives you little hits of success while you work through the bigger projects of CS50.

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