From economists to developers: a radical career change story

How long can it take you to learn a new profession and find yourself? Rubius Academy graduate Elena Beloval has shared her experience of starting a career in IT in 18 months.

I no longer enjoyed my job

I graduated from the International Faculty of Management at Tomsk State University. After the university, I got a job as an economist at the city's administration. Working in their specialty in a prestigious organization was a really good start for a young specialist. After 10 years, however, I realized that I no longer enjoyed what I was doing. I felt that I needed more creativity, interesting challenges, and continuous growth. This is why at the age of 34 I started thinking about changing my profession.

A friend advised taking a QA course

I weighed up my options: I have good analytical skills and I can work with Big Data. Just what you could use in the IT sphere! But I didn't have any special education (I'm an economist, not a tech specialist) and no experience whatsoever. I was hesitant: isn't it too late to completely change my life? Can I do it?

Following my friend's advice, I decided to start with a QA course. It's the easiest way for a non-techie to dive into the matter and start an IT career. The QA course at Rubius Academy had positive reviews. It's settled then — I'm studying there!

The ultimate goal: grow from a QA specialist to a developer in 2 years

The course was quite interesting and covered lots of themes: software development cycle, technical assignment with software requirements, error finding methods and indexation, verification of fixes. But most of all I liked testing automation when we wrote the code for automatic search of errors.

I decided to study C# in depth and didn't notice how it grew on me. This is when I came up with another big plan: grow from a tester to a developer in 2 years.

After I finished the C# course, Rubius offered me a trial assignment

Rubius Academy offers a great range of other IT courses, including the one on C#. It is taught by Valeriy Samoylov, a professional I learned a lot from. The course turned out to be difficult but interesting. I had to practice a lot since I was a complete newbie. But it wasn't in vain. On Demo Day, my graduation project was recognized as one of the best. Rubius spotted me and offered to do a test assignment,

I think I read it over and over a hundred times! Sometimes I felt desperate. Luckily, you could ask your mentor for advice after graduation and Valeriy always helped me. It encouraged me. I pulled myself together and kept working. Finally, I turned in my assignment and started anxiously waiting for the answer.

Hurray! I'm a junior developer at Rubius

I remember the day I received the email from Rubius. I was so scared to open it, what if I had failed? And can you imagine how happy I was to read "we invite you to join our team"? I got the position of a junior developer and joined a commercial project straight away. It was really frightening because of the big responsibility. Fortunately, when you work alongside great professionals, any task becomes doable. They will always give advice and I see how I'm getting more experienced. This is great! When you work in a team, you grow much faster than when studying books at home.

In total, it took 18 months from doing the first course at the academy to getting the job.

There is something special about the atmosphere at Rubius

After working in the administration, I was amazed by the corporate culture at Rubius. The atmosphere here is very creative. Just look at the kitchen and the summer terrace. The people here are all bright-eyed and you want to be just like them. Especially since Rubius reimburses the employees' education, English classes and even studying professional literature.

The company also takes care of its employees. We have bonuses for doing sport, vegetables and fruit in the kitchen, a massage chair, and even a massage therapist right in the office! But wait, there's more — a company hairdresser. This all was really new after working in a budgetary organization.

Want to change your profession — learn new things

Studying at Rubius Academy and receiving knowledge became the starting point in my new career and a chance to join a dream team. I especially want to thank the teachers for how they taught their subjects and worked with students. I still use the materials from the courses. This is how practical and useful this information is.

Now, as a Rubius employee, I have a 50% discount when doing the academy courses. This is why I'm going to continue my development. Databases, analytics, and UI — here I come.

When your job doesn't satisfy you, take courses, read, try new things. Something will definitely hook you on. It will be hard, but if you have a goal, you can do it.