
Programming as a career change? - zumtar
My sister-in-law has asked for my help about a possible career change.<p>Her current field is social science, and has a masters degree in politcal science, she&#x27;s worked at NGOs and in acedemia and has recently moved into a marketing&#x2F;communications company where she isn&#x27;t overly happy.<p>She asked me for advice on how to retrain as a programmer, she likes the idea of one day being a &quot;digital nomad&quot; (as she is in her early 30s and has no real ties to the place where she lives).<p>As she speaks multiple languages and has a good eye for design I think she&#x27;d be good as a technical person who can interact with customers and use her social science background to her advantage.<p>She is interested in web-development (but has no experience at all) so I suggested that she should first participate in some sort of self-study UNIX course, and then move on to a scripting language of some sort.<p>Does anyone else have any good advice that may help her?
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AnimalMuppet
To me, a self-study UNIX course does _not_ look like the ideal starting point
for a journey to web development...

(I don't know what alternative to suggest, because I don't do web development.
But UNIX seems pretty far away.)

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zumtar
Thanks for the comment, I'm a long time UNIX user (since the early 90s) and
because I see the majority of web-applications running on *NIX systems, I,
personally think a grounding in UNIX is quite important. I could be wrong
though, so I'm all ears to any suggestions for her.

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flyaboveothers
I'd have to agree with @AnimalMuppet.

Unix is not where I would suggest someone to being if they're new and going
for web dev.

I suggest maybe some course on simple html/css first. And then, a course into
JavaScript.

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cimmanom
I'd suggest an online course or bootcamp. Not because graduates of these
courses are immediately employable (they're not), but to get an overview of
what needs to be learned to be a web developer, and how much interest and
aptitude she has. After that, I'd recommend a deeper dive into whatever aspect
most interest her, in order to develop employment-ready skills.

