Left my job Mid -pandemic and pivoted my career to Software Development after 7 months of grind work.
Hello people from all over the Internet, today I want to talk about the life-changing decision that I took for myself. I quit my job Mid-pandemic and this was the scariest thing I ever did. I left my only source of income to fulfill my life goals. I didn’t know where I was heading next but I had faith in myself that I would eventually find something that I love and enjoy doing.
The Rant
Well as the title says this is the gist of my story. I used to work as a Business Intelligence (BI) Analyst for my previous company. It was a good job with an on-time salary and yearly bonus, not much rewarding but it sucked the soul out of me. Mainly because my learning curve became stagnant after I joined that company. For the initial four months, I was learning new things but thereafter it was the same mundane task that I have to do. Analyzing the data making reports and finding insights to check how the business is doing and making KPI for other teams. Well to be very honest I never understood the meaning behind keeping KPI for every member in the team, I have made KPIs for all the teams for different positions across my previous company and noticed that these KPIs are only for the management to use during the Yearly Appraisals and negotiate the increment with their employees. This is the hard truth that I learned over there, the target is always set in such a way that you won’t be able to achieve those, and for those who do achieve those the reward is so minimal that it ain’t worth the effort. Well, this post ain’t about how KPI’s work in an organization, maybe I should write about it later. Now coming to the point, this job sucked the soul out of me, day in day out I was feeling so useless, the work that I was doing didn’t have any impact on the company, even if I stopped working there won’t be anything productive I would have done to grow the business for that company. The poor management practices added fuel to the fire. All in all, I was frustrated with the work that I was doing and going nowhere with the expectations that I had set for myself. At that time I decided to resign from my previous organization and started exploring different areas to pivot my career.
Exploration Phase
After I resigned from my job, I started exploring different areas where I could start working and pivot my career in that direction. Before putting in my resignation I was in the comfort zone and I was not taking any action to improve my situation. but as soon as I handed in my resignation, I knew my D-day has arrived and I need to decide where I want to go ahead in my career. I started asking myself questions that I never asked before because of my comfort zone. when I put in resignation things became very clear to me and I started making a list of the skills that I currently have and other skills that can be gained by taking online courses with which I can look for opportunities. The list came out to be very neat and short, apart from the Excel, SQL, and QlikSense tool, I knew Python programming language. Although I hadn’t practised with Python for 1 year, I knew that if I were to pick it up again I could learn it again easily. Now the second thing was which profiles to target, I knew one thing for sure that anything related to Data Analyst, Data Scientist, Data Engineer, or ML/AI profiles are not my forte.
The second option was for backend development, but I couldn’t get free resources(online courses) to study. Upon researching I found out a lot of Buzz about React and React-Native, so I started learning about them. I got to know that React is a javascript library with which you can build Single Page Web applications and if you know React you can easily get started with React-Native framework via which you can build cross-platform mobile applications. Sounds pretty cool right? that’s what I thought. Next, I looked for job opportunities with React & React-Native which were great even at the time of the pandemic. After a quick analysis, I was 100 % sure that I want to go ahead in this direction. I didn’t waste any more of my time and started with the tutorials about HTML, CSS, Javascript, React and built a couple of projects with it. When I got some confidence I started making Youtube videos of my projects in React and that’s how I became a Youtuber :P. I built around 10 projects in React and later on, I started learning about React-Native from Youtube and built 4 apps using React-Native and uploaded 1 app on Playstore as well. It may sound to you that this happened so quickly but it took me around four months to learn the basics of React and React-Native and I was not at all ready for the interviews. But I knew one thing for sure that if I want to end the process then I have to start from somewhere, so then started my Interview phase.
The Interview Phase
Well before we proceed ahead with my Interview process, I would like to keep it brief and focus more on the process outcome. So before I started applying, I spent a lot of my time preparing my Resume because that is the first thing that any HR or interviewer will have a look at it. For which I saw a lot of videos on Youtube where HR was giving feedback on Resume. I noted all the points and updated my resume based on that. I even included certain Github links of my projects in the resume as it sends proof to the interviewer that you know git/github and also confirms that you did the project by yourself. It took me around two weeks to finalize my resume after which I just applied everywhere. I created my profile on all the popular job portals like Naukri.com, LinkedIn, Instahyre, Hirist.com and CutShort.io .There are many others but I focused my search on just these, if you feel like the previously mentioned are a lot for you to handle then I would suggest you go ahead with naukri.com and LinkedIn. Almost 75% of the interview calls either came from Naukri.com or LinkedIn.
Then there was nothing much to do, just apply and apply on all the jobs related to my field and wait for the interviewers to call you. I made sure that I included the Keywords like React, React-Native in my Resume and on my profile so that my profile will appear in recruiter searches. I started getting calls and I lined up my interviews, on an average of one interview daily for the starting one month and later two-three interviews daily. For the initial one month I bombed in 90% of my interviews, only some of them went to the second round but mostly I was failing in the first round itself. This sure was a frustrating experience for me but I kept on noting the questions that I couldn’t answer and I searched for them later. I kept on improving myself day by day and kept on giving the interviews. Soon enough I could see my progress, I was able to answer 90% of the questions asked during the interview and started moving to the second rounds and third rounds thereafter. All in all, it took me almost three months to get the final offer with which I was finally happy and stopped my search. In the end, I was able to get 5 offers from different companies out of the 50 companies that I interviewed with.
Yes this is my story, I am nowhere near the level where I want to be and I still have a long way to go. I plan to learn more about the back-end stuff and make more content on my Youtube channel. If you want to keep hearing about my progress then here is the link for my channel : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoG0cLFMs3Jr-GvCDEC8U_w/videos
