Michael Williams moved into Frontend Developer

To give some context to my answer I had already worked in IT Tech support for over 5 years & I didn’t know what my next step was outside of the helpdesk role. I actually tried something completely different & studied in the Netherlands for 2.5 years as a Video Game Designer at Saxion University of Applied Sciences. However, after some time trying my hand at that, I knew it wasn’t for me. An important distinction to make was that I had two choices with the Video Game Design studies. I could either be an artist or a programmer. I chose the artist role as at the time I wanted to try something completely different. However whilst I was doing the course, my programmer friends would tell me what they were doing and show & explain it to me as well. I actually had the thought “I really should have done the programmer role as I would much prefer doing this”. And although I dropped out of the course, I didn’t forget that thought I had & it spurred me to give programming of any kind a try. I found the ITCareerSwitch.co.uk website & took a look at the course & thought I would give it a shot! Now I am happily employed as a front-end web developer!

Although at the time it was very scary! The projects were my favourite part of the Traineeship. Being able to have something to call “your own” and see it start small & work your way up to a full-scale application gave me a great feeling of satisfaction. I also think project work is the best way I learn personally as well, I think a “learn by doing” approach really helped me learn & apply the fundamentals much better than learning the theory, as it gave me direct feedback on what doing something did!

I am a front-end React developer at iCode Systems. My tasks so far have involved creating new pages, receiving data from API calls to display in tables & creating forms to capture information to then send to API’s. I am also able to work from home 4 days a week which is amazing.