I just started my personal blog and the first is regarding my experience changing careers from marketing to web development. I think it might help those who are in this situation but still have not made the final decision:
Nice to see your enthusiasm. Remember one thing, changing your career path from one to other is not a problem. It is a good chance that you made in your professional life, and better than the problems you may face if you didn’t do it. As I, established my web designing company in Dubai, with no previous experience of running any startup, but due my dignity and confidence, I managed to make it one of the leading designing company in Dubai.
Glad to read your story. I’m 36 years old and completely sick of my career as an Operations Manager in a small business. I’ve started taking the FCC course and am enjoying what I’ve learnt so far. Just about to start my first project on codepen.
The issue I have is I can only really afford to study part time. My job has fairly long hours and I have a girlfriend who would also like to see me from time to time!
I know this question is probably impossible to answer but I’m going to ask it anyway, if I could say dedicate about 25 hours per week, how long do you think it’d take me before I’m ready to apply for a job?
I would same I’m pretty average in terms of natural ability and aptitude.
I will give it a shot at answering it. First and most important thing: stick to the 25 hours per week.
So, the milestones I see to be able to start applying for good jobs is: finish FCC Frontend Certificate and have about 5 other small projects in your portfolio with the code open at Github.
With average 36 hours/week, I took 2 months to finish FCC Frontend certificate and about one more month to finish 5 projects. I consider myself to have a good natural ability to coding.
So, with these premises, I believe in about 5 months to start applying. When you will get a job is much more unpredictable. But I can say more 3 months applying is a safe bet.
So 8 months for a junior job. This also helps you consider quitting your job to dedicate fulltime (it makes a lot of difference), with 3 big IFs: if you are really hating your job, if you are pretty sure that you would like to work as a software developer and if you can afford it.
Good luck!! Feel free to keep posting here at anytime. I will keep updating this thread with all my posts too.
In this post, I announce a project to provide Code Reviews to people learning to code. If you are interested in being part of it, please read it to know more.
I just turned 37 and am going through a similar career change. Time passes quickly doesn’t it? Ageism exists in every industry, but my experience so far has shown me that the best engineering teams do not care about age, only that you can do the work to the level that is expected. This is a good thing!