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This year has seen some big changes for me. My workplace, an English School, closed down at the end of 2021, so there was a lot of insecurity around work and just earning enough to live.

While that was happening, I was also trying to switch careers into the software industry. It’s hard to deal with just one of those but dealing with both at the same time was tough. If you have a family, you have to make your case for not just quickly searching for a new job in the role you are most qualified for; the role you just left. I had to say that I wanted something different and really mean it, even if that was harder to achieve.

But one good thing that happens to you when you lose your job is that it forces your hand. If you had been procrastinating about switching careers before, it tells you, “Now is the time!” in big, bright letters. It pushes you out of your comfort zone and asks you what you are going to do about that.

What I did about that was, one, start my own business and two, get a part time job in my chosen field. But how it turned out was not the way I had originally imagined.

At first, I looked for developer jobs and discovered that few companies are interested in self-taught developers with no CS degree and no experience. I would love to go back to university to study Computer Science but have don’t have the time or the money. I have to learn at my own pace, online, with free or inexpensive courses. At the same time I could see how the industry was grinding down younger and more qualified developers into a fine powder while asking them to live the role 24/7 and love the role 24/7 on social media. I got tired of seeing “entry-level” job ads requiring a minimum of 2 years industry experience and robots filtering out anybody without the magic keywords.

At the same time, I was trying to get my own kids interested in programming and I was introducing them to Scratch, a block based programming language create by Mitch Resnick and his Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. To be honest, I started to realise how much fun I was having while using Scratch and using all the new features that had been added since the last time I had looked at it. Coincidentally, I was also doing Harvard’s CS50 course online and I had to submit some problem sets in Scratch. My kids were enjoying it, I was enjoying it and I was enjoying sharing it with them.

While job hunting I would sometimes came across jobs for “programming teacher” and I started to think it might be a real option. Not only was it programming related but I had years of teaching experience I could draw on. I didn’t need to see myself as someone with zero experience. At the same time, I began to imagine what it would be like to have my own business and have more control over what kind of work I did. I wouldn’t need to ask permission to do the things that I loved doing.

In the end, I succeeded in making the switch. I don’t earn as much money as I used to but I’m happier doing what I love. I have my own business and I regularly teach programming in Scratch and Python to kids, in person and online. I recently did a course with the Lifelong Kindergarten called Learning Creative Learning and I’m growing, not only into programming, but also into education and pedagogy.

I haven’t become the developer I tried to become. I’m becoming the educator that I was meant to be.