Career Progression and Qualifications

[Silvs]

Hi All,

This is just mainly me thinking out loud but I'd be really interested to get other people's hints, tips or experiences. I've been improving my own Excel/VBA knowledge steadily for about 3 years now. I find it fascinating as well as being incredibly useful. My own career so far has been in finance/banking and I'm currently a mortgage adviser. Whereever I've gone though, I've developed tools or MI gathering spreadsheets, of increasing complexity, to help either the reps or the management work more efficiently.

I'm 30 now and I've got to the point where I want to take this up full time. I've looked around at the kinds of the opportunities that are out there and the vast majority seem to want a higher education degree in computing or the like or equivalent experience! This is the phrase that's causing me to scratch my head and wonder just what this means.

I've just enrolled on an MTA in software development through a local college so that's introducing me to Visual Studio and C#. I'm enjoying the course but finding it a bit of grind at the moment since I'm trying to unlearn everything I know to make sure I've got the basics down. This was the idea, to make sure my code was properly structured etc, but it's quite laborious when I just want to be getting on with learning new ways of doing things!

Anyways, this has gone on for much longer than I intended. I'm not sure I really expect to see many - if any - replies but thought I'd put it out there to see if anyone's taken the leap into software development from an unrelated background or if someone's done the MTA (or equivalent) and had success with using this to further their career.

Any feedback, comments or shared experience would be really welcome!

Cheers.

 

[sous2817]

Hello Silvs,

It just so happens I have a background in political science and religion, picked up Excel and VBA while doing a clinical research job and now I do C# development full time (all without picking up a computer science degree). The key for me was finding a position where I could develop my role as the needs grew. It started off building small Excel widgets and then as the complexity grew, I was able to convince my boss that I needed to do it in C# (and WPF because, why not?!). And 5 short years later...here I am. I was lucky to find a position that allowed me to do that, and that's the key part. A lot of times, it's finding some job and then *wow*-ing them with your Excel / VBA skills, and then growing from there. Not sure if that helps, but just wanted to throw my $.02 in!