#2 Changing my career was my weakness, today it’s my strength
Breaking into tech can be hard. In this week's interview will tell you all about the nerve-racking journey, while providing you with valuable resources and insights.
Bonjour fellow transitioners, welcome back to our second edition of our ChangePath newsletter 🧡💜
Easter holidays are around the corner - next to feasting ginormous amounts of chocolate, it’s also the perfect time to take some moments for yourself and think about your long overdue career change.
80% of people who took the leap and embrace change, find themselves, radiating with happiness. So let’s dive right in, to take your first tiny steps towards your new happy dream destination.
Before we begin:
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Our interview today is with Quentin, Co-Founder of ChangePath and Co-Editor of this newsletter. He took the leap, embraced his love for coding and dove into the tech world. However, he struggled with his self-esteem as a perceived newbie to the tech world. Off we go to hear more about Quentin’s 5-year transition. C’est parti! 🎈
3 Questions & Answers about Change with Quentin
Can you describe your career transition?
It all started with studying business at ESSEC Business School and working for big companies such as Danone or Amazon and I remember that I always had the feeling that I was not in the right place because my daily work was somehow boring me 😴.
In 2018, Amazon offered me a new job position as a Supply Chain Analyst and it changed everything, because it made me understand that I could not continue with what I was doing. The perspective of earning more money but with the same day-to-day tasks was just awful for me.
Before definitely deciding to decline Amazon’s job offer, I took the time to explore if there could be something else out there that would match my aspirations.
Since the only thing I was having fun with at Amazon was coding some VBA macros in excel, I started to look deeper into coding and engineering positions.
What I found really amazed me and I started to learn coding by myself online and realized that I could spend entire days obsessing over one line of code that was not working.
I had heard of École 42 and especially about the admission process which consists of one intensive month of coding. Sounded like a dream to me 🤩. I registered assuming “after one month of coding non-stop, I will know if I can picture myself coding for the rest of my career.”
And indeed, this month changed my life. I’ve learned how to code and about the Computer Science field in general. I remember being so amazed on the day where I coded an algorithm that could solve a sudoku. I felt so powerful!!
After this month, I was accepted at 42 and my journey in tech began.
A year and a half after doing 42, I started as a Growth Engineer at Zenly where I stayed for 3 years before joining other French start-ups including PhotoRoom as a freelancer.
Today, I consider my transition to be the best choice of my life, but I would say that it took me almost 5 years to see myself as someone who has fully transitioned.
Five years?? Why did it take you so long?
Because I always had the feeling that the things I was coding, even when they were working, were not good enough because they were made by a guy who learned how to code for 2 years only.
At Zenly, I was surrounded by the best developers in Paris and it was such a challenge to call myself a technical guy in front of them. As I was working in the growth team, all the coding I was doing had no direct impact on the app and I was considering all my colleagues to be way better than me.
Whenever I achieved something, I considered it as not good enough compared to what my colleagues would have done. I was even shy about sharing the things I was coding, maybe because I feared that people would think it was not professional.
Instead of being proud of my past background and all the hard work to break into a completely new field after only a few years, I was thinking that my first career in business was just a waste of time and that it would take me years before being able to call myself “the technical guy”.
This was all the more stupid when I realized a few years later that my colleagues were actually really impressed by my technical achievements, considering that I had a lot of other additional, useful skills gained in my previous career.
Today my perspective has changed - I code everyday and have built several internal tools and MVPs for the companies I’ve worked for while I still continue to benefit from my business experience at ESSEC, Amazon or Danone. Combining the technological skills with my business understanding particularly helps me as a founder of my own start-up. Now, I no longer consider my transition as a weakness but more as a strength and I cannot wait to build a start-up that will facilitate career transitions for other people.
Can you describe your career transition in three words?
Life-changing, source of pride & challenging
Follow Quentin’s transition on LinkedIn here.
Quote of the week:
"Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning." —Gloria Steinem
Podcast episode of the week:
Since we are talking tech this week, listen to this inspiring episode of PJ Metz, a former educator who now works as an Education Evangelist at GitLab. After teaching English for 11 years in Florida and South Korea, he made the transition into tech in May of 2021 after teaching himself to code with Codecademy during the pandemic.
“From teacher to coder”
Change your now and start your tomorrow with ChangePath. 🧡💜
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Thanks for sharing your path and all the doubts it came with ! Really inspiring story. It gives me the strength to pursue my own career change.
Excellent , what a path ! Well done and what a great example to share 👏👏👏💪💪