[Epilogue] From a Musician to an SW Engineer Webinar
How to Transition Your Career into SW Engineering
Narae Kwon studied Korean music in college and worked as a professional gayageumist for years in Korea and the United States. Now a mom and living in Silicon Valley, she’s on a completely different path, serving as a full-stack developer at the web coding platform Qoom. For the first career webinar of 2021, Simple Steps invited Narae to speak about her career transition story. A total of 85 participants listened intently as she shared her experiences, endeavors, and future plans. Here are the six most fundamental tips from Narae that all aspiring software engineers and programmers should know.
Learn to code
Join a boot camp or online/offline classes to learn to code. Narae, for example, took online courses at Udacity (Introduction to Programming and Front End Web Developer Program) for seven months. She also took Codecademy lessons and solved algorithm quizzes to augment her knowledge.
Build, build, and build
Build as many applications as possible, and you will learn more than you have ever learned from coding lessons. Join GitHub, Chingu (an open project platform) or Simple Steps study groups and start a project with other people. Building something of your own is also a good idea—Narae built a meal-planning app and has put it to good use especially since the shelter-in-place order.
Seek help in your job search
Narae signed up for an office hour with Simple Steps and asked for resume and interview tips from Doyeon, who also introduced Narae to the Wisen Space internship program. Narae’s job at Wisen Space was to help develop its web-based coding platform.
Know who you are
Narae participated in Simple Steps’ self-development program Next Steps, which helped her see her own aptitude for software engineering. The boosted self-awareness allowed her to pursue her career goal with more confidence.
Keep networking
As Porter Gale put it, your network is your net worth. Narae says that without any networking efforts, she would not have learned about the opportunities at Wisen Space or Qoom. Networking provides you with a great source of connections, who can offer you emotional support, motivation, and even career opportunities.
And keep learning
Narae never stops learning. As a full-time engineer at Qoom, she learned the database from MongoDB University and takes JavaScript lessons from Codecademy. She often searches Google or W3Schools to find answers to her own questions. She also uses Codewars to hone her coding skills and writes new codes on the code editor to familiarize herself with them.
Qoom demo
With the goal of maximizing her coding proficiency, Narae continues to take small steps forward every day. We hope Narae’s story inspires many to take steps toward their own goals. Simple Steps can be there with you throughout your journey with our self-development programs, resume consultation, Simple Hour, coding study groups, and many other interest groups. Also, join our Talent Pool to be the first to get updates on new job opportunities. We thank you all for your interest and participation in our career webinar series. Find more events on our website, view select previous webinars on our YouTube channel, and let us be part of your career journey!
Written by Hyemin Jung
