Hey, my name is Jade and I have 4+ years of work experience as a Project Manager and now almost a 1 year, professionally, as a Front-end Developer for an awesome startup called Loopin 🦉

I’ve been into software development ever since I was at secondary school. At school I kept to myself and got on with my work, usually being the first to finish in certain subjects. With the spare time at the end of my lessons, instead of being that person that was playing coolmathsgames, I would be on scratch learning to code!

After I had left school, I studied Level 3 IT Software Development in Central Bristol. The classroom was mainly filled with males bar, 2 or 3 women including myself!

I did a year at college and then went on to find myself an apprenticeship. The route of going to uni wasn’t really an option for me, I didn’t like the idea, that I had in my mind, of socialising and studying a particular subject for years that I wasn’t sure I’d end up doing in future. It took me a good 6-8 months to land my first role. I was looking at anything related web development to just to get me in the door and build up from what I had learnt in school/college.

I started as an IT apprentice, helping out with anything and everything that the business needed. Marketing, Support, Project Management and very little Development. I learnt so many skills, from communicating with clients/stakeholders to project management processes. After a year I went fully into Project Management, I worked with many different experienced Project Managers over the course of 4 years.

Whilst in that job, I slowly tried to keep up my development knowledge, this was mainly with CSS, by styling users' systems to match their needs/website. However, I wanted to do more, as I was not keeping up with the latest tech despite how fast it's always moving!

So I worked on small courses from Udemy and Frontend Mentor to build up a portfolio to start job hunting for my dream role (Frontend Development - if you hadn't guessed by now). By this point, I was responsible for about 10 medium - large projects in my role as a PM, and I was unhappy and stressed that by the end of the day all I wanted to do was relax at any given opportunity. Despite the lack of motivation, I dedicated time in the evenings & weekends to get myself to a stage where I was comfortable with the basics (again).

I then started applying for Junior Frontend Dev roles, I knew this would come at a cost for me since I was a full-time PM at this point. But I really wanted to just be in a job where I genuinely enjoyed what I was working on and be challenged, so the setback to me was worth it.

I had several interviews and got to the final stages in some places, however, the feedback I received was the same from every place - "Unfortunately, we've hired someone with a little more experience than you've currently got. Good luck in the future". This was a massive catch-22 for me because I needed a job to get experience but there wasn't a company that would give me that opportunity.

From here, I was searching for Bootcamp Coding courses and came across the self-paced _nology course, which I decided would give me the extra information that was clearly missing.

Whilst still applying for jobs, about 3 months into that self-paced course, I heard back from a great opportunity with a company called Loopin. This felt right. The company's values aligned with my own, I would be working with developers who wanted to train a future developer, and the culture was just what I was looking for.

I landed the job 🎉 and started in July 2021! I am very happy I made the change from a full-time PM to a Junior Frontend Developer and can't wait to see where this takes me in the future.