How Abbey Changed Careers from Retail Store Manager to Front End Developer Thanks to Her SheCodes Knowledge.
🙍♀️ Before SheCodes
Abbey is a very impressive SheCodes graduate who has completely altered her career trajectory thanks to her coding knowledge. She was born and raised in Janesville, Wisconsin and is still living there today. She went to the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and received a B.A. in Journalism and Women’s studies.
Her hobbies include reading, discovering new card and board games to play with family, and taking long walks with a good podcast. She’s a woman of many interests! She’s also had many jobs over the years spanning different fields. She’s worked in management, customer service, and visual merchandising to name a few. For the past 5 years, Abbey was working as a store manager.
Along with her many other interests, Abbey has also had an interest in coding for years to improve her personal and professional skill set. As an added bonus, she found that it’s also a fun activity that she can do with her daughters, one of whom is involved in a Girls Who Code club!
“I have been interested in coding to give myself a better advantage in the job market and love learning new skills. My oldest daughter and I would find little coding challenges on the internet to try together and I really started to enjoy the challenge that coding provided me.”
👩💻 Her SheCodes Experience
After coming across a Facebook ad for SheCodes, Abbey decided to join the free SheCodes Express session that’s offered.
“I joined the free class and was hooked! I loved that SheCodes is broken up into 3 parts and seemed more manageable to me than other programs.”
Along with the manageability of the workshop, Abbey also enjoyed the teaching methods, resources provided, set-up of the workshop, and personal attention that students receive throughout the workshop. Unlike other online coding courses she’d tried in the past, she found that she was able to truly gain a solid coding foundation with SheCodes 🙌
“Matt’s instruction was clear and had documentation to reference for later, each video had a challenge that expanded on the instruction, and I felt like I was a person and not a number. Everyone was celebrated for their accomplishments!”
“I’ve used Codecademy on and off for a few years but nothing ever clicked. SheCodes’ instruction videos and documentation made it easy for me to go from novice to expert!”
Abbey thoroughly enjoyed the SheCodes Slack community and being able to get all of her coding questions answered, too. She had a great experience learning with other women.
“I enjoyed the Slack community through SheCodes so much! I never felt like I couldn’t ask a Q about homework or a career pathway.”
Check out Abbey’s SheCodes Plus Vanilla JavaScript Project here 👉 https://modest-jennings-9cbffc.netlify.app/
🙋 How SheCodes has Helped to Change Her Life
Abbey got a job as a Front End Developer after taking the 4 month SheCodes Plus React workshop, which includes all three workshops that SheCodes has to offer. She was able to completely alter her career path thanks to her new coding knowledge 💪 💻
“I have recently changed careers from retail store manager to front end dev. Going through SheCodes gave me the knowledge to know where to start and analytical skill set to improve on that knowledge in my new field/career.”
“SheCodes helped me connect so many dots as a beginner and now I’m able to use that knowledge I learned through those courses to influence my day-to-day at work.”
Abbey is now working as a Front End Developer at Foremost Media and is finding her job to be very fulfilling thus far. When she first began this role, a typical day would include handling smaller support tickets, learning about new technologies that her company uses, and learning how to create clean and concise code.
Now, after having worked there for a few months, her daily tasks have developed and grown a bit. She manages her day with help of service and project boards. Along with daily standup meetings, she also partakes in upgrading sites, QA testing to ensure everything is ready before product launches, ADA compliance auditing, and content pop tickets for variety and more learning opportunities. She works closely with her project and support managers to get her questions answered in order to successfully handle service, hack clean-up, client, and project tickets (such as upgrading site modules, updating themes, and general QA). She really enjoys her work because it’s never dull and she’s always learning something new. Plus, it involves a brand new way of problem solving, which she finds to be very rewarding. She’s working on improving her coding knowledge every day and is enjoying soaking it all in.
“I have to problem solve differently now and it uses a different part of my brain which is so rewarding. Every day I feel so full of knowledge and I discover something new with every task I’m given.”
“I am taking my new field day by day and soaking in all the knowledge. I just want to keep learning and improving in HTML, CSS, JS, and ReactJS. There is so much to uncover and learn in each language!”
👩💼 Advice to Future SheCodes Student
When asked what her advice to future students would be, Abbey said that there’s nothing to lose! Read on to see her advice, along with her testimonials from each of the SheCodes workshops.
“You have nothing to lose by signing up for SheCodes and everything to gain! After each course you are given a video or document to read through for more insight on how to apply this knowledge or more ways to dive into the developer world and that is invaluable.”
“I enjoyed my entire experience with SheCodes! I have wanted to learn how to code for as long as I can remember but it was overwhelming for a novice like myself. Matt managed to make everything easy to understand and gave it to me in a platform that WORKED with my lifestyle for way less 💵 than a boot camp. I will 💯 be continuing my training with SheCodes!”
“After completing the introduction course I was very intrigued by the possibility of learning more coding with SheCodes. Much like Intro to Coding course this was easy to understand with videos and notes provided and it's possible to fit into my hectic schedule! There were challenging aspects to this 6-week course but there is great support provided and I feel accomplished and proud of myself that I completed it!”
“All 3 SheCodes' courses gave me the knowledge and tools to go ahead and finally learn how to code using everyday mark-up languages plus React which is currently an industry favorite! I am continuing my journey using the documentation that I can look at for as long as I need and continuing to code on my own. I feel confident that I can start applying for junior web developer positions with the idea that I can learn on the job with the tools I was taught by Matt and team!”
