Career change to Technology?

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Hello all,

I am new to the board.

I'm seeking opinions of what technology careers and programming languages would be good for me to learn.

I am a newbie when it comes to technology. I have recently started taking some beginner level classes online on various websites to get some experience. I've liked everything so far. I'm having a hard time deciding on narrowing things down on what to focus on. I have a friend who thinks that I would be good working on the back end of things, but I'm truly open. I would like to go to a coding boot camp, but at the advice of another friend, I should wait until I know what I want to do.

I had to resign my last job because my wife got a job that led us to move to the Raleigh Durham area. For the past 3 years, I've been working in the insurance field, largely doing data entry and research tasks. Those jobs I enjoyed doing and have been successful at. My background also includes a good amount of customer service work. I would say that I was good at that, but can see clearly now that those skills required didn't really fit with what I do best. I know I don't want to do a job that requires a lot of phone work.

If you wanna go into tech without a degree the best thing is to become a webdeveloper. You would need to learn Javascript, HTML, CSS and that could land you a job. Learn a Javascript programming framework (like the AngularJS, but something that's in demand now) and how to use a database (something based on the SQL database language, though I'm not sure what's hiring right now) and your odds should improve. Backend you would need to put in a lot more work than for a webdev just to be able to do the job and also there are a lot more webdev jobs available, so many that there are guys with 6 months of learning that can get good paying jobs (I'm kinda salty about this). Boot camps are mostly a few months of high intensity studying that prepare you for a webdev job, since It's so easy to land that kind of job. You could try doing backend with what you learn, mayby you could transition here from webdev frontend, since apparently now you can do that with javascript (with the help of nodeJS) and also you can now do desktop apps with javascript (electron) but there are probably less of these kind of jobs and they might require work experience. These Webdev positions seem to be transforming into "technician" jobs so that is probably your best bet.

I'm a student in my 3rd year of CS and what I've written is mostly from what I've read about this field over the last years, but I think the advice should be mostly accurate. This is assuming you're in the USA where most of what I've read applies to. But for other countries the story should be similar, although you might not find a javascript based job in these countries so easily, or any job at all.

Thanks for your reply. I appreciate your feedback.

I forgot to mention that I have a degree already in Business Administration and Economics

infrastructure automation is an interesting market too, it as a somewhat higher entry barrier but prospects for job are extremely high, it's a fairly unique and high-demand skillset. You should look into that if you're up for a challenge (and some great money )

Thankyou very much !