Techmongers crowning the STARS- Part II.
Hi readers!
Does your new-year resolution include providing your teams with amazing new colleagues? In this blog, we look into the topic of STARS again and how hiring without the requirement of a paper degree helped other companies attract a talented and sustainable workforce.
STARS: People Skilled Through Alternative Routes are an excellent answer to the hiring challenges of today. Well, definitely for those companies who still use the paper degree as a hard requirement for their open tech-job vacancies: Stop overlooking a large number of potentially perfect job matches by requiring a piece of ‘paper’. Instead, make the ‘culture match’ your new requirement!
In my last blog post from December 2022, I promised you shining star examples from my own network.
To provide you with shining STAR examples, I have reached out to a few in my network. And behold! Without a university degree, they have been able to pursue new careers in tech and prove to be remarkable employees
The STARS below embarked on Tech careers without a Tech paper degree. They got a chance after learning their tech skills in different Boot Camps or spending considerable time self-studying. Now they enrich awesome teams with their talent. They agreed to answer my questions and their insights are super interesting to read! So let me introduce them to you:
—-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Current Position: Frontend Developer at Adyen
Q: Before working in tech, what was your career/ job/employment/ training/ study situation?
A: Business Administration and Marketing (account manager at a bank, commercial manager at an ice cream distribution company, freelancer in digital marketing).
Q: Why did you decide to pursue this new career path in tech?
A: Since moving to Europe in 2016, I have been struggling to find a decent job with my background and past experience. When looking for new opportunities in the job market, I discovered that Tech companies offered much better wages and working conditions than any other sector. So I decided to start learning web development by myself, to give it a try and see if it was the right fit for me. I liked it from the beginning and decided to invest my time in it.
Q: What were the stumbling blocks that you have experienced in pursuing this new career?
A: When I started applying for jobs after studying for about 6 months as a self-taught student, I got hundreds of interviews, mostly with recruitment companies, and I couldn't go through the hiring processes because most of their clients were asking for more experienced developers or at least a computer science degree. After many attempts, I realised that a boot camp could help me overcome this obstacle and better connect with companies in the market.
Q: What alternative training have you followed to assist you with the skills needed for this tech career?
A: Udemy courses, books that I borrowed from my brother who is a senior java developer (self-study), and web development bootcamp at Codaisseur, which helped me land a job at the company I work for.
Q: What would you advise employers out there who might still require a paper degree as a hard requirement for job applicants?
A: I think that now more than ever people have access to information anytime, anywhere and that every day, changes are happening at an accelerated pace. There are a lot of talented people who want to work, who are willing to learn and who have the right cultural fit for your company. But the only thing they need right now is an opportunity. So today's market needs are not the same as years ago, and these people with different backgrounds who are learning to program but don't have a degree in computer science can be a great solution to bring diversity and multiple skills to your company, which brings speed and innovation. They are crucial for any business to survive and succeed in today's market environment.
Current Position: API Engineer at AppyThings
Q: Before working in tech, what was your career/ job/employment/ training/ study situation?
A: Restaurant owner, worked as a chef and also as a bartender.
Q: Why did you decide to pursue this new career path in tech?
A: I studied computer science but during my studies, I never felt like I belonged in the field, as I was not like my classmates, even when I was one of the top students in my class- I felt insecure until I finally walked away from it. Until I saw Codaisseur Academy and there I got back the confidence I needed. I always wanted to go back to IT because I love programming, but I just didn't dare to try.
Q: What were the stumbling blocks that you have experienced in pursuing this new career?
A: I didn't experience issues with having any paper degree. The biggest stumbling block was my technical background, even now that I’m an API engineer: besides the developer knowledge I had to learn a lot about the up-to-date system architecture that is being used out there.
Q: What alternative training have you followed to assist you with the skills needed for this new career?
A: I did a 10-week long full stack web development Bootcamp. I also got additional training at my employer to learn all the skills needed to become an API engineer. For example, I did the Google Cloud - Associate Cloud Engineer certification.
Q: What would you advise employers out there who might still require a paper degree as a hard requirement for job applicants?
A: I would advise them to not be so rigid, they will for sure be surprised by the talented people there are out there without a degree.
Current Position: Frontend Tech Lead at TNW
Q: Before working in tech, what was your career/ job/employment/ training/ study situation?
A: Master's degree in business science and 5+ years experience in digital and growth marketing.
Q: Why did you decide to pursue this new career path in tech?
A: To be able to work with my clients on projects that would also cover the coding side, besides the technical marketing implementations.
Q: What were the stumbling blocks that you have experienced in pursuing this new career?
A: Impostor syndrome was and still is the main blocker. Even though I believe it was one of the best decisions I ever made, switching careers in my late 20s to start something so incredibly technical was ,and still is, quite challenging. The feeling of not having a strong-enough professional or technical background can be hard to overcome, but it’s a learning process…
Q: What alternative training have you followed to assist you with the skills needed for this new career?
A: 10-week long Full Stack web development course with certificate
Q: What would you advise employers out there who might still require a paper degree as a hard requirement for job applicants?
A: Depends on the nature of the job. For most web development positions I’ve seen in my career, a paper degree requirement could easily backfire, given the general lack of tech talent and given the fact that most of what’s normally required in these positions wouldn’t most likely be topics that people would learn at University anyway. But there are obviously numerous positions where some level of certification is understandably a requirement, so I don’t want to generalise too much about it.
—-----------------------------------------------------------------------
So in the meantime, you might ask yourselves, how can I be sure that a STAR is what I need in my team?
As eloquently described by my source of inspiration for this blog ‘Opportunity At Work’, I quote:
“Consider this: Think through the top 3-5 skills that you use daily in your job that make you effective. Where did you first learn each skill? When and how did you gain mastery of it? Most of us accrue more skills and sharpen existing ones throughout our careers. Like STARs, a large portion of every worker’s abilities is acquired through alternate routes. While technical skills such as coding can be taught, more nuanced skills like social perceptiveness, service orientation, and active listening that are fundamental to many roles, the STARs already hold”.
And if you are worried about where to train your employees that are lacking technical skills, you can always reach out to us here at Techmongers. We will be elated to advise you on how to hire based on cultural match and provide your employees with the necessary technical skills in one of our numerous courses.
* This article contains quotes from and the term ‘STARS’, created by Opportunity At Work.
