Building the courage to transition from sales to coding

For many graduates, any job - related to their field of study or not - is a good start. “You know, your first real job plays a big role in your career,” Peri shared, reflecting on her first job, “And that kind of identifies your road ahead.”

In 2014, Peri moved from her home country of Kyrgyzstan to Türkiye to study industrial engineering at Hacettepe University in Ankara. Once graduated in 2019, Peri found that first job working as a sales engineer at an engineering company. And while her knowledge from her engineering degree was tangentially relevant, the role primarily flexed her multilingual skillset.

Keep moving, keep learning

When her job moved her to Istanbul, Peri accepted the opportunity, but she quickly became restless, “So the problem is that after some time, you start getting bored because everything becomes routine and you are not developing yourself anymore.”

“So this is the time when I was like, ‘I need to do something else, I need to be something more, there is a lot more out there to achieve,'” she explained with a hint of the urgency she felt at the time, “I wanted a job which offered room for creativity and in which acquiring new knowledge every day was a must.”

But at the same time, looking for something new was daunting. “I was already working and I could not leave my job. I needed to provide for myself and I could not just start from zero.”

Gaining the courage to make a change

It was during this time that Peri spoke with a friend who had just completed a Re:Coded bootcamp.

“That's one of the things that inspired me. He was not satisfied with his previous job, so he joined a bootcamp from Re:Coded. After that, he found a job as a developer and he's happy right now. So I was like, ‘Oh, wow. That's great.’”

According to a past study conducted by StackOverflow, over 85.7% of developers taught themselves a new language, framework, or tool without taking a formal course. So having a hands-on and guided learning experience was an opportunity that would be hard to turn down for anyone looking to deep dive into coding. Luckily, shortly after speaking to her friend, Peri saw a Re:Coded post for a backend bootcamp that was open for applications.

It actually takes some courage if you're already in one field and you are trying out another field. It takes courage to decide and to take action towards that. It was the best possible option for me to take that step and get closer to my new goals.

New learning environment

After a rigorous 4-stage application process to a Re:Coded backend bootcamp, Peri was accepted as a student and quickly found herself immersed in a new learning environment.

“For me, to be honest, it was challenging,” Peri said about her first days in the bootcamp, “but the best thing about bootcamp is that even if you don't have much of a background, you can get in touch with trainers anytime you want and they will explain things for you.”

“Our trainer used to tell us, 'All of the questions that you have are important and matter.'” Peri described an open and supportive environment that allowed her to open up to both her trainers and peers. While not everyone had prior coding experience, there were a few students with hands-on experience, who were able to support their peers and answer questions.

“It’s up to me”

“To be honest, I was not expecting to become a developer in four months. But we learned a lot in two months of technical training and two months of working on our capstone project. We experienced a real work culture and applied everything we learned throughout the bootcamp.”

In the bootcamp, we experienced the real world, unlike in most of the universities.

Peri shared, “A few of my peers in the bootcamp, who are computer engineering students and graduates, shared that it's totally different from what they learn in the university.”

Looking beyond the bootcamp, Peri feels that she has a lot of options and opportunities: “ The most amazing part of becoming a software developer is that I can work as a freelancer, I can work project-based, I can work for a company, and I can work remotely. It's up to me and there are so many opportunities.”