It’s never too early to start your job search

I am a career changer, my background is in aviation and education. I know they don’t really go together but they did for me. I was on a journey to be a pilot and to gain experience I was working as a flight instructor. I had lunch with a new acquaintance who would become a good friend and my boss. She basically recruited me to teach some classes on Saturdays. I was working as a flight instructor and as a STEM educator. I did this for many years moving along in both careers and sometimes they overlapped.

About a year ago I decided to pursue a career as a software engineer and I did what most people do and googled it. There were so many choices so I jumped into well all different aspects of it. I had experience in web development as I taught some introductory classes in this. I also had experience with python, because I played around with it with a raspberry Pi. What I didn’t have was a clear indication of which direction I was headed. Had I spent some time researching the industry I could’ve saved myself so many months of wandering around aimlessly.
Here is what I wish I would’ve done

1. Research the economy. I knew software engineers made lots of money, but what exactly is a lot of money? $100,000 sounds like a lot of money but not when you live in San Francisco and have to pay $2000 — $3000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.
2. A timeline from start to finish. Nobody really talks about how much time it takes to get that first job. I now know that my first job is hard to get but when I first started I thought I could get a job right after I built my first app. Hahaha to old me. I should’ve reached out to junior developers at that time to hear how long it took them. This way I could’ve started looking and establishing a plan much sooner than a year after starting to learn.
3. Having a self-marketing plan I thought I was doing myself a favor by not distracting myself from the learning process but that’s mainly because I was naive thinking that the job search would be easy. This industry is all about who you know. I really wish I had started making connections from day one.

Learn from my mistake and start preparing yourself for that job search. Start thinking about where you want to go and get yourself out there. I know I am starting now too.