From Dancing to Development: Discovering a New Creative Outlet in Coding

_nology trainee Bex has just begun a drastic career change from performing arts to software development. While they may seem worlds apart, these two career paths have more similarities than you may realise...

Written by Nology Team - 09.07.20

The initial step in a new direction is the hardest one, but if the pull is strong enough you will feel you have no choice but to take it.

You cannot make the word CHALLENGE without the word CHANGE. I’ve decided to make the move into tech from a very different world, and taking those first few steps in a new direction seems to be so much more taxing than some of the longest of walks. It seems you can walk the same route day in, day out and get used to the ups and downs. When you come to learn what corner those muddy puddles are round, your ability to dodge them is ingrained, and when on auto-pilot you are no longer truly present. It is arriving on the day when you finally take the different route that presents challenge and change…and sometimes even more pleasure. 

I’ve grown up performing and have worked professionally in Musical Theatre for the last seven years, graduating from a full-time Musical Theatre college in 2013. Being completely honest, coding isn’t something that always fascinated me like it does now – it wasn’t even really on my radar.  Performing, and specifically dancing, was my one and only love, and I was on a one-track mission to dance professionally. Growing up, I happily invested all my time outside of school hours into dancing. As time passed and I progressed into my late teens, I became so driven to fulfill those dreams that I wouldn’t even consider other career options, and this continued throughout my training. When those pipe dreams started blossoming into reality and I began performing professionally, I couldn’t have been further from contemplating a career after performing.

I have been extremely lucky to have realised the hopes and dreams I set out to achieve as a young ambitious performer, but the sacrifices I have made in my personal life in order to follow that dream have accumulated along the way. While beginning to consider a career change, tech kept coming out on top. It really is a rapidly growing, dynamic industry that is full of constant development and seemingly endless exciting possibilities.

Coding is such a desired skill, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find that coding training programmes didn’t require a relevant degree to enrol, and that was the real start of my journey. I found _nology when researching training courses, and after a taster evening with them in January, the friendly, welcoming, and encouraging atmosphere was so striking that I knew I had to train with them. The more I looked into Web Development and discovered how much of my creativity could be utilised through coding, the more encouraged I became. The dream of working remotely from my laptop alongside my self-employed boyfriend, and having the opportunity to travel together gives me a new sense of excitement that, a few years ago, only the dream of performing could. Putting in time and energy to learn a language, write the code, and see it perform on a device for its users, is so rewarding. It has become an unexpected output of creativity for me, and one I am excited to build on.

Posts

Related Stories

Launch a future-proof career. Discover how you could learn to code, and transform your career by joining the _nology 12 Week Software Developer Course.

Four weeks ago I jumped into a complete career change and started an intensive coding course. I was thrilled and excited to begin a journey of learning...

Read More

June 15, 2020

I graduated from Swansea with a degree in Physics and not much idea of what I wanted to do next. I started applying for engineering and physics jobs and I’ll...

Read More

January 2, 2019