In this featured blog, Juno Bootcamp student Julia Wong shares her thoughts on changing careers from marketing to web development.
Welp. Here we are again, back at square one. An unfortunately familiar place, yet this time it doesn’t seem as daunting.
Throughout life, you often hear stories about not ending up in the career that you spent your university years studying. That your career path could be a long winding road, with peaks and valleys, turns and obstacles, or sometimes even a hard stop. After six years of navigating my road through marketing, I found myself approaching a fork in the road.
After six years of navigating my road through marketing, I found myself approaching a fork in the road.
Continue in marketing — attempting to find my place, grinding. Or take a turn, down a path filled with opportunity yet equal amounts of uncertainty. For me, the prospective of the latter and unlimited potential made the decision a no-brainer.
So here we are, stop 1 on this web dev journey with Juno.
But how did we get here?
During my time in marketing, content management started to become a part of my role that I found a liking to. Designing, maintaining, and editing websites became my happy place as I became driven by the desire to learn a new skill.
Throughout my life, I have always been guided by the idea of personal growth, whether that be within my personal life or my career. This pursuit to grow and push myself created the foundation for my determination to learn.
Consequently, this pursuit of growth brought me face-to-face with the fear of becoming stagnant in my career.
Consequently, this pursuit of growth brought me face-to-face with the fear of becoming stagnant in my career.
So as I sat at my desk, in between contemplating life’s meaning for the fourth time that morning and what I’d be having for lunch later that day — I decided it was time to make moves.
While sifting through my day-to-day, I decided to take a closer look at the parts of my job that really energized me. The elements that I always looked forward to. I’ve always enjoyed branding, design, and content strategy — finding creativity in building marketing assets.
Working in WordPress and having a basic understanding of HTML had only just scratched the surface for me. And the pursuit to understand and learn as much as I could, led me straight to Juno.
In the few short months, I’ve been navigating this road forward, I’ve learned to love so much about coding that will continue to resonate with me as I remind myself why I’m on this journey.
Coding encourages learning from your mistakes, finding solutions, and most importantly, being able to face failure in order to succeed. And in these short months, it’s been a reminder to myself to be resilient, comfortable with failure, and open to always trying something new.
Coding encourages learning from your mistakes, finding solutions, and most importantly, being able to face failure in order to succeed.
As I write this, having completed the intro to Web Development course, and going into my third week of the immersive Web Development Bootcamp. I can safely say, at the very least, I’ve gained more than just the fundamentals of code.
I’ve gained the confidence to say that starting again at square one doesn’t seem so scary.
This article was originally posted on Julia's Medium blog. Check out Julia's LinkedIn here!
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