How Tiffany Transitioned from Recruitment to Tech

Hey, I'm Tiffany. I'm 30 years old and currently living in Melbourne, though I'm originally from Sydney. I graduated from batch #452 in late September and am now working as a Junior Developer at Marketplacer (yay).

Until very recently, I was working in recruitment where I was building teams for some pretty awesome tech companies in Australia. I was in recruitment for around 7 years by the time I started with Le Wagon. I've always enjoyed technology & learning about how it actually works but figured I had completely missed the boat when I pursued Psychology after high school instead of tech. When I was recruiting in tech, I was dealing with a lot of interesting people and companies who were building interesting things - I realised that I wanted to get involved. I also realised it wasn't too late. I started doing some Le Wagon workshops to see if I'd enjoy coding (been a while since I coded my MySpace profile) and of course, I did. The current pandemic put some things into perspective so I decided to take the leap... and the rest is history.

My experience with Le Wagon has been awesome and I have to applaud the team for how smoothly things ran despite a lot of last-minute changes due to the pandemic. When I signed up, the course was meant to be delivered both in-person & remote but that quickly changed when we locked down and were waiting on restrictions to lift at multiple points. I believe we were the first batch to run completely remotely but it definitely didn't feel that way.

I personally enjoyed how everything was structured - lectures in the morning, heaps of pairing & enough teachers to help us work through problems. I also like that we were taught 'the long way' of doing things before being shown more efficient ways. I think this is important because it means that we grasp the concept, not just the 'hack.' Project weeks were stressful but rewarding - I almost feel like we learn the most in those weeks because we put everything from the entirety of the syllabus into practice then, with a team of people we haven't worked with before (much like real-life).

I expected the job search to take months due to the effects of the pandemic on the job market, and my own expectations of a role/company (I knew what I wanted and I didn't want to budge), so my plan was initially to chill and keep studying/coding for a bit. However, I was lucky enough to land the perfect role for me quickly after graduating, so I've been spending my time trying to get my head around everything since (large codebases aren't as scary as I thought!). I still have a lot ahead of me so my plans are really just to get comfortable with code, keep learning, keep practicing.

As with any major decisions, make sure that you do your research to help you decide if this is the right path for you. We have a friendly alumni community who are always happy to share genuine experiences and answer any questions you might have. I know that speaking to alumni helped me a lot when I was on the fence myself. I would also recommend checking out free coding workshops or online courses first to make sure that you actually enjoy coding (kinda important that you do). The course is intense and you're really going to have a good time if you are prepared for it!