Sometimes you have to move laterally or even take what seems to be a backward step in your career in order to grow.
I did not become a professional programmer straight away.
I couldn't. I missed the portfolio and qualifications.
So what I did was join a cool company (Sun Microsystems) even when that meant I had to go back to a support role which was not the thing I most wanted at the time.
However this gave me 2 things:
1. Excellent troubleshooting skills, which serve me to this day debugging any software issues and getting people unstuck with their code.
2. Unexpectedly this offered me the opportunity to automate things in the job, which gradually taught me scripting, web development and, later on, designing a complete automation solution.
This then led me to my initial goal of becoming a full-time Python software developer.
So the lesson here is that sometimes you have to accept a less optimal job or position for the necessary grind and auxiliary skill development.
It can offer you the growth potential that, when looking back, was actually your career opportunity in disguise.
Julian's story about getting into programming / Python / PyBites is quite similar. You can listen to our stories in our latest podcast episode: