Anneka Sillitoe

"As a Software Engineer, I am often building small areas of our codebase that will ultimately bring about a positive experience for our users and allow them to get the education or training they want and need.As a 'Campaigner' type - I am often good at meeting deadlines and highly organised, which is great for planning how to achieve the ultimate goal we will have as our current deadline. I also like to help people work together, which is perfect for making sure my team pair programme together and ultimately learn and achieve our small goals together. As a 'Coordinator' type I am able to provide a service and deliver what people need, which is perfect for a developer as we are sometimes given rather abstract ideas by a partner and will often have to turn that into code to make it work for them. It often requires again for people to be pulled together and to be willing to help anyone when needed.The 'Influencer' type is good at explaining so that people understand and good at finding and reviewing information. These are two rather essential skills to my role. Being able to reach a point in your career where you can mentor and explain to someone who is less experienced in a particular area is an invaluable skill to be able to pass on your knowledge and help them gain an understand of the code you wrote and why, or how something works. This also often requires you being able to find relevant documentation for reference, as it does when first learning new things yourself. An 'Influencer' can also work on their own or in a team, something that is super helpful when you want to work remotely or have a big deadline looming and lots of different little bits to get finished in time for it.I ironically did not match with a 'Developer' role despite being creative and simply loving to make things better, but ultimately I understand that whilst I love to do these things in my daily role, I can now see that my path lies in management."

"I am a Software Engineer. I help build products to help businesses reach their overall goal, whether that be in commerce or social good.I work in a small team across a bigger organisation building our area of the product to improve the platform for both the user's and the partners we work with.Each day is different and I love that I'm not always 100% certain of what the next week, or sometimes even the next day will bring. I like to see code I've written shipped and be used by actual people. I like to solve challenges that arise and generally work on making some area of the internet more accessible for a range of different users.I can work remotely with my role and often do at least once a week. This gives me time to not have to work about the commute in the morning and really focus on the task at hand. I often find I am at my most productive when away from the office, but that's not to say I don't get lots done when around my team, who I love to support and pair with on new areas of our little world.Starting salaries in the industry when I joined were around £25,000 a year in London. This has probably risen to at least £30,000 and continues to grow as the technology and industry continues to become more evolved and advanced, but that just makes it a more exciting industry to be a part of."

"I attended university and studied Journalism. I then went on to work as a freelance journalist and in PR and Marketing in the Music Industry. I decided at age 28 to start learning to write code for fun at home in my free time. I had initially seen code and thought that it was just too hard for me to do and that I wouldn't be able to work in that field. After 6 months of doing sitting and doing online courses everyday, I quit my current job at a record label and moved on to attending a coding bootcamp for 16 weeks. It just proved I could do this. I just had to believe in myself and my skills.I learnt all sort of things I didn't know existed and the range of roles available in the tech industry. I then went on to get my first front end coding role, which I stayed at for 6 months before moving on to my next role where I spent 18 months working in the tech for good field, building products to try and help young adults leaving care to get better attention giving to them by local authorities.I decided to move on after 18 months to my new role as I needed more support in the area of tech I was working in and wanted to gradually move towards. I joined FutureLearn in 2018 and have started to receive the support I felt I needed at this point in my career to start working towards my goals. I am currently helping to give education a wider reach around the world and change people's lives by allowing them to learn new skills from home towards their future career choices, just like I did."

"I am a bit of science geek. I love watching programs around science and would probably spend more time doing my own experiments if I had the space, but I do love speciality coffee and have spent many evenings studying the science behind what makes a good roast and how to extract the exact flavours to make a delicious cup.I love animation and cartoons and have never considered myself a good drawer, but in my area of work I understand practice makes perfect and have just started to learn techniques and practice digital drawing, finally turning my love of animation into a bit of a self realised reality. I aim to eventually see if I can combine my coding skills and new drawing skills and make a very short animation myself.I also love pro wrestling. Generally considered a male orientated sport and activity, I like to prove that girls like these so called male things too. And just my daily job, which used to generally be considered more male orientated, I as a female am not only working in the industry, but helping to shape it and move it in a better and more accessible direction for all."

"I am currently working on building the payment and enrolment journey at our company for microcredentials and making this as smooth and seamless as possible for both user's and hooking up to our partner's systems (which is generally universities and their needs to enrol students to be able to award them credits). Basically this comes down to essentially holding standups every day with my team to make sure we are all working towards the same goal and available to help each other should issues arise. I will then often pair programme on a ticket that relates to this overall goal, which could be around building specific parts of the enrolment journey, or building how to handle payment through paypal for our microcredentials courses.I am often writing in React, which is a programming language I'm very familiar with, or Ruby, which is incredibly new to me. So each day I often learn at least 1 new thing at the moment, which I am often able to put into practice again not many days later. I'm often at my computer for much of the day, but also spend time away from it whiteboarding problems and ideas with my team or working with others in my organisation on other smaller projects, such as starting a summer internship programme at our company."

"I got A-Levels in English Language, Media Production and Studies and Psychology. I went to University as a mature student (25 years old) to study Psychology after working as a manager in retail for a few years. I decided to change course after my first year of university, and moved into studying Journalism. I completed my degree and received a 2:1. I then went on to work as a freelance journalist and in PR and Marketing in the Music Industry. I decided at age 28 to start learning to write code for fun at home in my free time. After 6 months of doing this, I quit my current job at a record label and moved on to attending a coding bootcamp for 16 weeks.I learnt all sort of things I didn't know existed and the range of roles available in the tech industry. I then went on to get my first front end coding role, which I stayed at for 6 months before moving on to my next role where I spent 18 months working in the tech for good field, building products to try and help young adults leaving care to get better attention giving to them by local authorities.I decided to move on after 18 months to my new role as I needed more support in the area of tech I was working in and wanted to gradually move towards. I joined FutureLearn in 2018 and have started to receive the support I felt I needed at this point in my career to start working towards my goals. I am currently helping to give education a wider reach around the world and change people's lives by allowing them to learn new skills from home towards their future career choices, just like I did."