Image by Gabo Castellanos

Changing career at 33

March 31,2021

We are living in fast changing times. We have to evolve and adapt constantly in order to not only survive, but excel.

And that is my case. I need to evolve, adapt, and yes; overcome. I have a bachelor’s degree in Management of Tourism Enterprises and a master’s degree in Corporate Communication. My major experience area is business travel and corporate events. I got married 7 months ago and I live in Mexico, where the current economic environment, even before the pandemic, isn’t promising at all and Covid-19 made it a lot worse. And imagine working in a global company that provides business travel services around the globe. Obviously, the travel industry collapsed, we’ve had a very complicated year.

3 years ago, I started a Facebook fan page about soccer, which is one of my passions and I grew it to more than 11K followers, so I decided to build a website for my Facebook page. I didn’t know nothing about websites or coding, so I bought a domain and built it with WordPress, just customizing an existing theme. And I loved it. So, I built a second webpage about NFL, and then a third one about travel in my country. All three done in WordPress, but then I realized I still knew nothing about websites and how WP was limited if you don’t have the money to pay for premium features, or if you don’t have the knowledge and I wanted more.

Then the pandemic hit. Travel suspended, jobs lost and I started to think that the travel industry was not my future. I realized that developers jobs were available everywhere, well paid jobs (mostly), every company was ‘forced’ to move online to survive. Then it hit me: I have to change my career. I need to change my career. I will change my career.

But I’m too old. No one will hire me. I have no experience, no studies, no portfolio…nothing.

ME

Am I? Let’s see:

  1. I’m too old. No, I’m not. I mean, I am 33 but in my country we have a popular saying: “más vale tarde que nunca” (better late than never) and the life expectancy in Mexico is 75, so I am actually young. And even if I were older, I would still decide to change my career, again, better late than never.
  2. No one will hire me. Well, it is my job to convince them otherwise. If I become good enough, they will fight to hire me. And if no one does, freelance is always available, right?
  3. I have no experience. Nobody has at first. It is about start building projects and getting experience. There is no shortcut, only working hard to gain experience. Period.
  4. I have no studies. And that’s why I am taking advantage of many course platforms, youtube, and many other tools to learn. Also, I enrolled myself into engineering school, so I will have the studies, I am having the studies.
  5. I have no portfolio. Therefore, I am building it. As of right now.
  6. Nothing. In fact, I have everything I need to achieve what I want: health, intelligence, determination, time, support, resources. It is a matter of time.

Yes, changing career is scary, but losing my job and not being able to find a new one is scarier. And to be honest, I am loving this developer world. It’s awesome and challenging, full of possibilities.

I am studying a bachelor’s in computer systems engineering, learning HTML5, CSS3, JS, Ajax, PHP and MySQL.

So I am changing my career and I will document this change and let you all know how it goes. You can follow my progress here and in gabocastellanos.com

Wish me success, not luck.