New Career always looking for wisdom

Hello Mike and thanks for your story - you may guess it sounds quite curious :)

I dare to assure that pandemics have touched IT world too - e.g. I myself was proposed alternative between leaving job with month bonus or accepting unpaid vacations of undetermined length. I was a bit bored by the project so gladly left immediately and found something different month later.

Though I suspect that it's hard to compare occupation of air pilot and of backend programmer in terms of happiness / dullness / romanticism :)

I am always looking for help in any tech field: what to learn, how to practice, what i can do to stand out.

My two kopeeks would be: if one aims to get into IT, the plan is like this:

• decide about desired position
• browse monster.com or something similar for open positions of that kind
• read the requirements, e.g. list of necessary technologies
• quickly get acquainted with them, build some basic skills
• start applying for jobs, visiting interviews

In more details - there are various types of positions, not only "programmers" (or developers) but also QA (testers) various business analysts and managers - and, for example, support engineers (I guess it is what "Google IT support program" is about).

Python is popular among research engineers (e.g. in my past project - logic behind recommender blocks on macys website - it was used by data-science engineer who was responsible in inventing logic schemes themselves) and for QA automation.

I believe QA position may be ideal to start as it may need less technical skills initially (compared to developer), still giving opportunity to write code, investigate and tweak solution etc. And to progress further to BA / management or to development, according to personal preference. Some time ago I dropped a brief tutorial on using Selenium with Python as QAs usually do to create automated tests for web. Though probably I'd better record a video version.

Generally related positions may want knowledge of some language (Python, Java and C# are used for this more often), some HTML/CSS/JS and HTTP basics - i.e. how web works - and some SQL basics. Acquaintance with version control system (e.g. Git) and issue tracker (e.g. Jira) usually looks nice. In total it all could be covered in about a month to get less or more ready for interviewing...

If anyone is interested in aviation i have been flying for the last 15 years and keep my instructor certificate.

I won't be surprised if many people are interested :) though for most of us there always are obstacles and people resort to dream (e.g. "when I get retired I'll try paragliding perhaps" etc).