You're Not Starting From Scratch: How Your Transferable Skills Can Help You Advance Into a New Career

Before becoming a software engineer, I worked as an editor and journalist.

I have always enjoyed writing and learned a lot from the work I did every day. But after switching to tech, I realized that many career changers try to hide or at least downplay their previous work experience as irrelevant.

However, I am convinced that many skills are perfectly transferable from one career to another and can in fact bring valuable perspectives and approaches to a new field. In my case, the skills I learned while working as a journalist helped me transition into a career in software engineering. Since then, the skills and lessons I learned in software engineering have helped me write and publish my own book.

Here are my top tips for successfully changing careers and getting off to a good start in your new role.

Don't neglect your existing skills

Make a list of the most important skills you already have and think about how you could use them in a different job or role. Communication skills, time management skills, teamwork experience – all of these things are invaluable assets for any role you take on.

Writing is another example of such a skill. Although it may not be immediately obvious, the ability to write well is a crucial skill for any software engineer: from documentation and technical drawings to code review comments or pull request descriptions, writing plays a important role in the daily work of programmers.< /p>

"What if the core skill that allows you to excel in your current job could be your unfair advantage in your new job?"

Being a clear writer is a proxy for being a clear thinker - my previous experience as an editor has improved my ability to think critically and solve problems, which is at the heart of being a software engineer . Writing skills are my unfair advantage in the software engineering world. They helped me in my technical career and allowed me to write and publish my own book documenting my experience of becoming a software engineer.

What if the core skill that allows you to excel in your current job could be your unfair advantage in your new job?

Learn from the best

It can be difficult to find yourself at the entry level in a new career after having acquired skills at a certain level in your previous job. But as long as you're open and willing to learn from colleagues and existing experts, you'll be surprised how quickly you'll start gaining expertise.

As a self-taught software engineer, I often struggled with impostor syndrome and felt intimidated by my fellow computer science masters. Coming from a background in writing, it was easy to feel that my skills weren't relevant to my new role. However, my ability to consume and process information, acquired throughout my years as a journalist, has been an essential strength and allowed me to learn from the best.

"I realized that my colleagues were so much better at coding and I took the opportunity to learn directly from them"

I realized that my colleagues were so much better at coding and I took the opportunity to learn directly from them. Besides working with brilliant people, I also started reading books written by brilliant programmers - books that were way beyond my intellectual abilities and took my skills to a much higher level.

I used the same approach to write my book. First, I turned to textbooks and started reading everything the greatest writers had to say about the art and science of writing.

Second, I started learning from the best fiction writers. I felt that filling my free time with examples of excellent writing lifted me up and took me to new levels of skill.

I tried to imitate writers and copy their writing styles. Sounds naive, but it worked. Once I wrote the book, English speakers were impressed by how few errors it contained and assumed it had been edited by a native speaker. This was not the case. So I guess my trick worked!

embrace the struggle

That's the lesson I learned quite late in my coding journey, and I wish I had known that from the start.

When I started coding, I struggled a lot. I struggled with everything. Most of the time, what my colleagues were saying made no sense to me, and I had to look up even the most basic words they used. Shell, Docker, Compiler; I had to understand the meaning of the most basic concepts before I could even attempt to do the actual work.

"Wrestling is a crucial part of learning and should be seen as something that will help you improve, not something to be avoided"

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