It’s Time for You to Pick Up Technical Skills
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In this article, I reflect on a personal turning point, when I chose to embrace and learn technology instead of continuing to avoid it. I wrote this piece in the hope of inspiring as many people without technical background to take the leap and learn some technical skills.
In summer 2019, I enrolled for Le Wagon’s web development course as a part time student. Out of frustration. I had been working in software companies for over half a decade… and yet I understood little to nothing about how software was made. In every role I had, my work basically consisted in either making presentations, building things in spreadsheets or sending emails.
While there were surely opportunities for me to continue doing just that, I felt this wasn’t going to cut it for me:
So, here I was, motivated to learn as much as I could about software development.
Le Wagon was a great experience . If you want to learn coding and don’t know where to start, do it. You will learn the foundations of web development with a group of people as motivated as you, supported by amazing and passionate teachers.
I did not become a software developer after the program. This would have required me to dedicate myself entirely to programming, which was not my intention. What it did for me was remove my limiting beliefs when it comes to technology.
A few examples:
In short: the bootcamp did not make me become a software developer in 6 months. But it changed my relationship to technology. I was now ready and willing to use it at work.
Around the same time when I finished Le Wagon, I fell into no-code.
At first, I was very skeptical: “I’ve just spent the last 6 months learning to code, and you’re telling me I can get the same result without writing a single line of code if I use Bubble?” What these platforms were selling seemed too good to be true.
And yet, after experimenting with Airtable, Make and Bubble among others, it became clear that I was wrong. I started with small experiments and quickly ended up building solutions to concrete problems I had at work.
And this was 4 years ago. Since then, no-code tools have significantly improved and so has the number of things I can do nowadays without writing code. Unlike me, you won’t even need to learn programming to leverage technology.
It would be a mistake if you did not learn how to.
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” Alfred North Whitehead
The future of work is automated - and your work is no exception. Will you be the actor of this change or will you let others take the lead? I don’t know for certain which approach is best, but I know which one I would pick.