Studied IT with modules in systems administration, databases, and introductory programming. Final project on campus helpdesk portal.

Theory felt distant from real workplaces. Choosing between networking, security, and development tracks.

Learn how systems fail in practice—not only happy-path diagrams. Documentation and reproducible setup matter.

Completed industrial placement at Ebix Technologies Limited as a IT Support Technician.

Treat every recurring ticket as a product backlog item—automate or document once.

Networking fundamentals, databases, OS concepts, Java/Python basics, web technologies intro, group projects, presentation skills

First-line support for 20 users. Resolved incidents, escalated to infrastructure team, and maintained asset records. Rotated on out-of-hours rota.

Repetitive tickets and impatient users. Learning when to escalate vs solve. Burnout from volume during migrations.

Users describe symptoms, not root causes. Clear communication prevents reopened tickets. Small scripts save hours weekly.

Promoted to IT Engineer / Level 2. Customer satisfaction scores above team average.

Treat every recurring ticket as a product backlog item—automate or document once.

Active Directory, Office 365, ticketing (ServiceNow/Jira), remote support, hardware imaging, basic PowerShell, SLA awareness

Owned server estate and core services for business unit. Planned maintenance windows, joined incident bridges, and supported application teams during releases.

Legacy systems with poor documentation. On-call fatigue. Developers expecting instant infra changes.

Reliability is a feature. Infrastructure and apps share blame in outages—learn each other’s language. Started writing Python to replace manual checks.

Trusted for migration projects.

Windows/Linux servers, VMware or Hyper-V, backup/DR, firewall rules, monitoring (Zabbix/Datadog), patch management, VLAN basics

Automated reporting for IT team. Built internal tools asset dashboard ,license tracker. Completed Odin and shipped portfolio app.

Time after on-call weeks. Tutorial hell vs shipping. Comparing to CS grads.

IT troubleshooting maps to debugging. You already know prod concerns—logging, env vars, rollbacks. UI/UX was the steepest climb.

Two portfolio repos and internal tool adopted by team.

JavaScript, React, Node.js, Git, REST APIs, SQL, unit testing, CI basics

Negotiated move to hybrid role / applied for junior dev openings. Highlighted automation, internal tools, and incident collaboration in CV. Targeted employers who valued ops-minded developers.

Recruiters filtering ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds. Pay step or lateral move. Imposter syndrome in sprint planning.

Built a container orchestration system on Kubernetes that scaled to 120+ microservices, serving 1.5M monthly users.

Accepted developer role (see next milestone).

Ask your current employer for a rotation before resigning—many will try to keep you.

Interview prep, portfolio narrative, networking with dev teams, understanding SDLC from the other side

Joined squad building product. Fixed bugs, owned small features, improved observability because ‘I’ve been paged for this before’.

Estimation and front-end state. Letting go of ‘just SSH and fix it’ habits. Code review feedback stung at first.

Small PRs. Tests are cheaper than weekend hotfixes. Product owns priority—infra instinct to solve everything now must soften.

Promoted to Software Developer. Shipped a new authentication system used by 5,000+ users.

TypeScript, React/Next.js, API design, code review, Agile ceremonies, pair programming, feature flags

“Built and maintained a scalable web platform; collaborated with QA and DevOps, and provided DNS and certificate expertise to the team.

Balancing feature speed with tech debt. Staying current without chasing every framework. Explaining dev trade-offs to former IT colleagues.

Best ex-IT developers bridge support and engineering—they design for operability. You do not need to hide your ticket-queue past.

Owned critical service module; increased deployment reliability by 40% and cut production support escalations by half.

If you are in IT now: script one task this week, open-source one small tool next month, talk to one dev team lead this quarter.

Full-stack delivery, cloud (AWS/Azure), CI/CD pipelines, code quality, mentoring juniors, technical design notes