When your job security is on the line, tee up your career goals with the right bootcamp

From unemployed to Sales Engineer and Jr. Front End Developer, Bison Technologies.

"You're setting aside six months of your life in essence to learn a new skill. [Nucamp] really focuses on how to fit it into someone's life, specifically a mid career change, and how to fit it into your life without making it overwhelming"

This is Sean Browne, a Nucamp Full Stack Bootcamp graduate and now a Sales Engineer and Jr. Front End Developer at Bison Technologies.

Sean enjoys spending time with his wife and three children and one of his many family pastimes is golfing with his son.

Being from a sales background, the golf course is a familiar place for leisure and business for Sean.

His technical sales in past roles had lead him toward looking at the technologies he used and how they can relate to future companies and design engineering.

This led into him following a data science path, but he found he really enjoyed the building side of things versus the data collection side as it felt more creative.

Job instability in the oil and gas industry is par for the course so when his job started showing all the flags of instability, he knew making a career change was befitting.

After already going through a few down turns with the oil and gas industry he was ready for peace of mind, and more time at home with the family would be a great bonus as well.

Coding seemed the right choice and he began to improve his coding skills through self learning online.

After earning a number of certificates from completing free courses, Sean started to get to points where he felt stuck and needed guidance to point him in the right direction.

Getting lost in the rough digging through online discussion posts trying to find someone with the same issue was tedious and didn't come with a guaranteed help.

"I realized I just need someone to talk to, someone to bounce ideas off of, but definitely didn't feel like I needed to get a formal Computer Science degree."

Finding a coding bootcamp was the right approach shot toward his new career.

Sean knew he didn't want the intensive 40+ hours a week dedicated to learning or to have to move to a new location.

He was used to a flexible lifestyle and knew after successfully earning his MBA in the past with a similar flexible setup as Nucamp's, he knew he would be succeed in the format again.

What solidified his decision was listing out what all his bootcamp options covered and Nucamp hitting the same skills as all of them at a third of the cost.

"I felt Nucamp offered way more value than other bootcamps."

Sean really benefited from having the community that attending Nucamp bootcamps brought him.

To him, the dedicated Slack channel was huge for bouncing ideas off of classmates and reaching out for help when getting stuck on a project.

After graduating he still interacts/talks with classmates and enjoys celebrating everyone's wins together as past classmates can be seen on LinkedIn accepting jobs.

Describe your job search process.

Sean hired a paid a service to rewrite his resume and they posted it to specific career sites.

He also set up job searches through Indeed, LinkedIn, and Dice.

In the end, he found the the best thing was leveraging his LinkedIn network and the Nucamp career guidance.

He only got 2-3 interviews sending out his resume whereas the majority of his interviews came from LinkedIn connections that referred him or he had a prior relationship with.

After 7 months he landed his new position where he is utilizing both front end and back end skills.

What advice do you have for people who are thinking about attending a bootcamp, but haven't yet registered?

"Do it. You're already right there. Chances are you're at a point where you've realized that this is the next step if you want to keep going down this path and you're probably just waiting for someone to tell you this is the next step. Go for it, jump in."

What advice do you have for people who have already started the bootcamp and they are just about to finish Bootstrap?

"On the three or four times I was really struggling with something I actually learned more by trying to answer someone else's question than I did by just asking a question and waiting for an answer. You truly will get whatever you put into it... It's one of those things."