The teacher who landed a developer job before finishing the course

Nine years in classrooms

Natalie Lazaroo spent nearly a decade teaching: a degree in early childhood education, six years in preschool, then about three years teaching primary students at an international school.

The turn came through a subject she taught called ICT, where she introduced kids to basic coding with Scratch. She realised she was good at it, and she was already the unofficial IT person colleagues turned to for anything technical. "That's where I decided, hey, coding is actually not a bad career, and I'm pretty good at it."

Part-time, because the bills don't stop

She joined Sigmaschool's part-time programme in September while still teaching. Studying full-time was never an option: she needed to keep her income, because the bills had to be paid.

Her routine was work from 8 to 5, a break for dinner, then at least three hours of coding a night, fuelled by a lot of coffee. She knew from the start it would be hard, because Harris at Sigmaschool told her so upfront. What she learned is that hard is not the same as impossible. "You can't stop. If you stop, you definitely forget."

“If you think you want to jump into tech, I think you should just go for it. It is not easy, but it's not impossible. If you put in the effort, definitely you can code.”

The Nintendo Switch clone

Her most memorable moment came about a month in, when her group of three was tasked with cloning a real website and picked the Nintendo Switch site. "It's like, now I really know what coding is like for real, and I really made something out of just code."

The hardest skill so far has been JavaScript, because any one problem can be tackled so many different ways, but she found that once that foundation is solid, everything after it gets easier. When impostor syndrome kicked in, the community pulled her through. Peers won't come to you, she says; you have to reach out first. But every time she asked, students from both the full-time and part-time batches were willing to help.

Thirty replies, three interviews

Midway through the course, once she'd finished the front-end module, Natalie started applying for jobs. She reached out to Sigmaschool graduates who had already landed roles, asked exactly what they did, built her portfolio and kept submitting applications.

The numbers were sobering. Over about three months, only around 30 companies replied, and just three of those led to formal interviews. "It was a bit demotivating. But don't give up. There will be someone who would believe in you and your persistence to learn."

The interviews themselves came in every format: paper tests, being handed a computer and told to build an exact layout on the spot, walkthroughs of her projects. She didn't manage to answer everything. She got hired anyway.

Hired before graduating

About a year into the part-time course she resigned from teaching, and the following month started as a developer at The Techno Set, a Zoho partner that builds systems for startups and small businesses. She's still completing the back-end module at night.

Her employer wasn't concerned that she hadn't finished the bootcamp. They were more interested in what nine years of teaching had built: the desire to keep learning, and no shyness about asking questions when unsure. Her final project will now be tied to what she's building at work, and her boss is excited about it.

She hasn't picked a lane yet between front end, back end and UX. The role exposes her to everything, and she's fine with that. "I always believe: try it first and you'll know."

Just go for it

A computer science degree was never on the table. As a working adult, she couldn't devote three years to studying and going through the whole process again, so the bootcamp was the reasonable route, and she had a tech job before she even finished it.

Her advice to anyone weighing the same move is simple: stop weighing it. It isn't easy, she says, but it isn't impossible, and the effort is the part you control.