Hi Poonam! First off… can you introduce yourself?

Hi 👋🏽 I’m Poonam (she/her) and I’m an educator in the engineering bootcamp space. I’ve done all sorts of learning as a student, from apprenticeship training, bootcamps, part-time introduction courses and the joy in that journey is what made me want to switch into educating other people. Outside of work I love a few things: saunas, dancefloors and finding pockets of peace in this hectic world.

Love that! Now tell us about your career to date… what do you do now but also where did you start?

Right now I’m a Lead Data Engineering Lecturer at Northcoders, a bootcamp provider for a variety of coding disciplines. I started at Northcoders as a bootcamp student in early 2021 learning JavaScript full-stack development and shortly after went for a role as a mentor.

Over the next few years I moved into more delivery-focused roles, teaching people various skills needed to enter the industry as a full-stack engineer. This year I was able to pivot into Data Engineering and became a lead in that bootcamp’s delivery.

Before Northcoders I was an Ad Ops executive in London and came from a Biochemistry background at the University of Birmingham. So not a completely conventional entry into tech but a STEM theme throughout my career so far.

We love a non-linear career path! So what's the best and the worst part about your role?

Best thing: seeing my students grow into developers in their own right after not knowing a coding language a few months earlier. Watching that confidence grow and the careers people go on to take is incredibly rewarding.

Worst thing: Making decisions to balance all the fab things we’d like to achieve as a team with the constraints of time we have with the students in those 13 weeks. There’s never enough hours in the day but that’s why we use agile working.

So true! Any tips you can share for someone aspiring to get to where you are today?

Say yes to learning new skills, it’s changed my life to pivot into software engineering and again to data engineering. I’ve gained more than I ever could have lost by “starting at square one” and venturing into the unknown. If you’re unsure, Code First Girls or any other free part time intro course is an excellent way to test the water and well worth the time investment in the short-term.

In terms of teaching folks software engineering skills, a big teaching skill is knowing how to break down big ideas into real-world digestible chunks. How would you explain a queue or a stack? A ticketed Argos queue or a stack of plates? It’s also about guiding people to form opinions on the work they create. Who does testing help apart from yourself? Why do we bother breaking logic down, or not? We as mentors can have a broader understanding of the ecosystem a dev works in and guide mentees to think about the bigger picture of their code, therefore producing conscientious developers.

So one tip is to think less about holding all the “knowledge” of code and more about how we come to well-reasoned conclusions on what we’re building. The tools we use, the context we think about, the questions we ask ourselves.

And for anyone struggling with code at the moment, one massive thing you could do for yourself is to do a mini lecture on it. I found explaining code “to a 5 year old” really helped me find holes in my own understanding. This could apply to tech tests/code demos/any project you’re working on that you feel lost in. It’s also the reason I feel pairing is so beneficial at least when we’re junior in our careers.

Excellent advice! Ok final question… have you experienced any challenges in your career and how did you overcome them?

My biggest challenge has not been finding space for my voice to be heard, it’s been finding the courage to enter that space. It has been hard to allow myself to say “Yes I’m qualified for that promotion”, or “people want to hear from me” and a large amount of work has been put in (and still is) to not apologise for my presence or my voice. A load of things have helped me through this journey, including extreme compassion for myself so I don’t take failure as a reason to not stand in my power again. I’ve also taken a lot from the examples of people who stand in their power around me: mentors, mentees, friends/family, speakers at various events. Especially the ones who look like me. And feedback has helped immensely to see myself the way others around me do - which is often more positive than you imagine with way more heart emojis. I used to always expect perfection from myself before I started taking initiative in my teams. Now I ask for forgiveness not permission.