Professional football, TV production, customer support, contracts coordinator, and now software engineering. Safe to say it’s not your typical career path.
Pre-Rightmove, I grew up playing for the MK Dons Academy and was fortunate enough to have been offered a Professional Contract with them. This was a one-year contract to be a part of the first team, which was an incredible experience. Unfortunately, this only lasted the one season.
Whilst looking for other clubs, and wanting something new, I was approached by a recruiter to go and play for an American College on a Scholarship. So I took up this opportunity and joined a college that was based around 30 mins from Atlanta. This was such a fun experience! Living in America, traveling around to the likes of Carolina and Florida for matches was really cool. Although being out of education for three years and then going back into it full-time, as well as having no money, was a shock to the system, so I decided to come home after my semester.
When I came home, I was looking for jobs and my sister was working in TV Production at the time. She let me know of a job going on Celebrity Big Brother as a runner. It was an exciting opportunity so I took it. Instead of it being just the one job, I ended up staying in TV production for around three years, working on some of the biggest reality shows around; Big Brother, Geordie Shore, TOWIE, and Love Island being the pick of the bunch. A really fun and fast paced industry. But after a few years of working in TV, I was looking for something a bit more stable and that’s where Rightmove came into the picture.
I worked as a Customer Support Executive for 2 years, before moving onto working as a Contracts Coordinator for a further two years. During my time working as a Contracts Coordinator, I embarked upon an online course on Codecademy learning all about Front End; starting off with HTML, CSS, and then moving onto the world of JavaScript. Whilst doing this, I also spent a few days in the London office shadowing the Find team. After months of learning online and shadowing Find, Rightmove offered me a secondment. I spent two days a week with Find and the other three days continuing with my current role. Whilst on my secondment, my time was spent shadowing, pair-programming, working on smaller tickets, and working on my own personal projects to build up my knowledge. This was a really great experience learning off some great engineers. When the secondment finished, I was offered a role as an Associate Software Engineer in the Business Partnerships team back in Milton Keynes.
The coding life begins!
As I’ve moved from a non-tech role, there has been a lot to get used to. Trying to wrap my head around what all of the different meetings were for, getting used to a new way of working, and understanding what every different acronym meant, was tricky. Safe to say I often found myself a little confused.
In Business Partnerships, we are currently developing a new app to be used by our Account Managers. I’ve spent a lot of my time building components and inputting them into the pages we are making, as well as pair programming with the more senior engineers in the team to help improve my knowledge. As we are a small team, it has given me great exposure to lots of new things right from the start. Whether that is working on more complex tickets or presenting at the Internal Systems (department) meetings, I’ve been happy to give it all a go. As time has gone on and my knowledge is growing, I’m beginning to be able to work independently on my own tickets from the design stage, right through to releasing them.
Alongside this, I have been working closely with my Engineering Manager to set out some objectives to work towards. This has been good to look back on and see how far I’ve already come. One of my main objectives was to progress from an Associate to a Software Engineer, which I’m pleased has recently happened.
It’s been a challenging but enjoyable journey so far. There is definitely a lot more for me to learn, but I’m excited for it and look forward to where this new career path can take me.