Changing career at thirty-five looks daunting?
In fact, you may succeed, even if you are a stay-at-home mom with an education that doesn’t correlate with your future job.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to start a career in programming, where to find the learning resources, and how to stay motivated and handle the lack of time. Interested?
Let’s get started!
Maternity is a period to reevaluate your life and find a balance between the need for self-development and your family. Many stay-at-home moms starve for professional achievement. But how to handle personal growth and home duties?
A career in software development is a way out. It doesn’t require a university degree to start and get hired; the skills can be learned online; it offers a free schedule and is financially rewarding. If you want to evaluate your future income, just google “how much does a website development cost?” or “what is a software developer’s salary?”
How to start with software development?
There are numerous free resources and communities to help you start learning how to code. To become an entry-level programmer, one should know essential technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Free coding schools like freeCodeCamp, W3Schools, Udemy, Codeacademy, Codementor, and Hackerrank will provide all the needed knowledge.
These platforms have a similar structure, and that simplifies the learning process. Mainly your learning routine is organized in the following way:
- You get a simple explanation of the subject
- The exact page offers you a tool to try to code what you’ve just learned
- A short test at the end of each lesson helps to consolidate the knowledge
You may practice on several platforms simultaneously since they are all free. The only thing you need to move on is continuous practice, which is a challenge for a stay-at-home mom.
How to maximize your coding time while being a mom?
As every hour of your day is scheduled, making extra time seems unreal. Still, you may squeeze learning into your daily schedule. Here’s how:
- Establish a routine. This will eliminate the time you spend roaming online without a purpose.
- Fill learning in throughout your day. You should do only some tasks in one sitting; you can do them in small rounds here and there.
- Wake up an hour earlier once a week. Horrifying advice for a stay-at-home mom? Yet, learning new skills is a hard job, and you be conscious of that.
- Set priorities. A Forbes council member, Amy Blaschka, reminds us that being busy is not the same as being productive. Productive people set boundaries and protect their time by doing only what is essential, leaving everything unnecessary behind.
How to handle disruptions?
Holidays, unexpected emergencies, and sickness are the things that can rock your schedule, no matter how determined you are to practice.
Although such situations are a step back, one shouldn’t take them as a sign to give up. The same refers to failure. If something works as expected, learn to perceive this as another chance to improve. Even if it turns out that software development is not for you, there are other options. You can try a craft of a copywriter or QA engineer. Numerous companies outsourcing QA testing hire remote employees. Read more if interested: https://mlsdev.com/services/software-testing.
As Forbes says, “Leaders use failure as fuel, maintaining grit and perseverance to keep going.”
Summing up
Changing a career as a stay-at-home mom is a real challenge, which requires a lot of effort, persistence, and desire to grow. The abundance of free learning material online makes this process more accessible, but not everyone reaches the finish line. Yet, successful people never give up, which makes the difference between winners and quitters.