We recently held our second Autumn term tutor enrichment seminar: Career in Coding. The seminar was led by four expert panellists, all of whom have extensive experience of coding, both for personal projects and within their careers.

The purpose of the event was to share insights about where to start with coding, as well as how to find a job or career path in coding, they also shared some incredible top tips to help our attendees along the way!

Meet our panel of experts: 

Andy Walker: Andy spent 30 years working in Software Engineering including 10 at Google where he worked on Google Search, Ads and Maps. He also taught software engineers how to give technical interviews and sat on hiring and promotion committees. Since then he has run 5 engineering tribes at Skyscanner and provided consultancy for a startup working on self driving cars.

Vanessa: Vanessa has worked as a Data Engineer for four years after studying Neuroscience as her undergraduate degree at UCL.

Lydia Thomas Koilparambil: Lydia is currently working as a Software Engineer on the AI Agent Team. She has a degree in Computer Science and Business. 

James Draper: James currently works in Engineering. After studying and undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Brighton, he found that his passion was in the field of robotics. He then completed a Masters in Intelligent Systems. His first role within robotics was working on robots which made sandwiches, He now works for a company within R+D and Development.

After introducing themselves and sharing their coding journeys, our panellists shared their top tips with attendees. Here is just some of the expert advice shared during the event:

• Don’t be intimidated when you first get started. Code is not something that you see everyday and try to remember that you’re not the only one who is confused!
• The best way to learn is by doing. You will make mistakes but it’s how you recover from those mistakes that matters. Mistakes are an opportunity to learn.
• You have to find something that you’re interested in in order to learn. Find a project that you enjoy and are passionate about.
• If you can, find a mentor to support you. There are many coding meetups where you can network and meet people! Also make use of LinkedIn to reach out to people and businesses for experience.
• Writing code is just a small part of coding. You also need to be able to read other people’s code and debug your own.

Team Up would like to thank our panel of expert speakers for the wealth of knowledge that they shared during the seminar. We hope that our tutors left this seminar feeling inspired to start their own coding projects and with some fantastic advice about starting a career in code! 

Keep an eye on our social media channels @teamuphub to hear about more upcoming seminars and workshops, exclusively available to our Team Up volunteers and alumni.

If you are interested in joining us to tutor on our upcoming programmes (and gaining access to more seminars like this!) please contact us at: tutor.applications@teamup.org.uk or apply now to start your Team Up Journey.