I’m currently undergoing an intensive training course with prospects of employment in the IT industry. Well, this was supposed to be my career path five years ago, before it got derailed by marketing. Now, it feels like I’m finally back on track and ready for a big change. You know how they say that no one wants to hire you after you’re past the age of 35? That’s neither true, nor representing of the current reality. I’ve experienced it. I’ve seen it happen in my immediate community. I see it brought up in career talk all the time. And now I’d like to add my two cents into the discussion.
Why put an age cap on a career start at all?
This actually makes sense in a number of industries. You don’t aim for the Olympics, if you’ve only just discovered your love for sports in your 40s. You don’t become a prima ballerina, unless you’ve been training since before you learned how to spell your name. And to my dismay, if you’re not a chess grossmaster in your teens, the chance of becoming one later in life is statistically impossible.
However, in many professions and fields of expertise, you can and will become very successful at just about any age, as long as you have the right aptitude for it and put in the work. For example, I was quite surprised that one such example would be aim shooting in Olympic sports. Long distance running is another activity that many people get passionate about later in life. At my old job, this hobby was kind of put on a pedestal, with many participating in marathons and the company even trying to integrate it into their corporate culture.
Then, when we go back to career talk, I see people in their 30s and 40s switching to IT from all kinds of other professions – university professors, bankers, and, in my case, marketing copywriter.
It’s about aptitude and experiense
Recently I was listening to a phisolophy lecture about what it means to discover and nurture your talents. The lecturer said something along the lines that, as children, we all have our interests and preferences, but what really matters is to discover your natural aptitude and support it. With time, effort, and experience, this aptitude will grow into something larger. And that is what we’ll call a talent.
I’ll be completely honest with you, I hated hearing this! This is something that I personally never had growing up. I never had the right books or supplies. I had very limited support and no proper community. Most of the time, I would go to school, come home, and watch TV. I had little interest in my studies and still somehow managed to get top grades and stay at the top of my class. I was very bored. Cable TV was my only comfort, and it was actually what helped me pick up the basics of foreign languages. Some German here, a little Polish there. This one time my school teacher made me enter a translation competition in the German department and I even won the first price, which was a CD player with radio and those futuristic looking speakers.
Random interests as building blocks of competence
That was pretty much the highlight of my high school ‘career’. Other than that, my learning has always been very scattered and random. I would grab at new interests without really understanding how to apply it to my future career. Only years later I discovered that… those silly forum role playing games I was into? Well, congrats! You learned the basics of HTML and CSS creating designs and game updates for your forum. And that time when you randomly joined a forum imitating the Durarara! anime city gang The Dollars? And then they started sharing invites to Google+? And all your new friends on there were foreigners? So you decided to switch all communication to English? Congrats, your language level has now been confirmed as C1+! Pretty impressive, eh?
So, without really realising or noticing it, I turned my fleeting interests into practical skills, which I’m currently using in my new about-to-launch career in IT.
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