I’ll keep my situation incredibly simplified for an easy answer – looking for answers from people currently doing this only who have experience :
– I’m on a spouse visa, worked as an English teacher for 4 years now been an account manager for overseas clients in a Japanese company for 3 years
– not decided yet but very interested in coding and web design and considering a career change into this or anything with IT closely related.
– have a degree in music so completely unrelated but took a basic course in Python online a year ago so have some VERY basic knowledge on coding. I use excel at work so whilst I’m decent with computers anything into software development/web design/coding like I’m interested in I have zero experience.
– without quitting my job, whats the best way to learn and get qualified to at least go into a trainee position somewhere? I’m aware Japan isn’t the place for this as salaries here are low in this area weirdly but we might head back one day and also this is just hypothetical now anyway.
Anyone in this field with some advice I would really appreciate some advice on where to start:
サンキュー
3 comments
Do not pay the ridiculous money that coding boot camps charge even if you manage to find a weekend one. You can teach yourself. Python is a good starting point but not that useful for front-end development which by the sounds of it is what you want to go into. Learn some javascript then learn React.js. It will open up plenty of opportunities including jobs in software development.
While Python is a good start, you also mention wanting to go into webdev which is a whole other ballpark. For that, you’ll wanna focus on Javascript and one of its frameworks. Python is more commonly used in web-scraping, automations, and data science.
I just wanna point out something regarding starting to code as a job for those coming from zero CS background: while it is definitely possible, it is not easy and it is not quick. Any course that says “from zero to employable in 3 months!” is lying to you; it takes a while to build the necessary skills. Companies will be unlikely to hire someone with only mere months of online courses when there are thousands of CS grads every year. Take the time to really learn and understand the fundamentals, then build up to more complex topics. Don’t just watch videos and copy tutorials: it’s important to build your own portfolio projects (especially since you have no prior experience). Learn data structures and algorithms, then practice programming problems; these will be a staple in applying to developer jobs.
It will take time, but if you really want it then it is definitely attainable.
Paiza has example programming problems that you can do in Python to train yourself. They may have other programming languages too, but I only did their free python course. It’s in Japanese so it helps one learn all the programing terminology in Japanese and see example programming problems in Japanese. Paiza is also a recruitment firm but I don’t know anything about that side of their business. As you do the example problems you progress from skill level D through A, then finally S. Each time you do a problem they’ll let you know how you did compared to your peers, update your overall score and then update your estimated worth. So it’s kind of gamified. They’ll also send you job openings (via email) and say what skill level it applies to (D to S) so it’s easy to know what might be applicable to you. But again, I’ve never applied to anything. So it’s possible all the positions they sent me were all black 企業 and I didn’t know.