Eteroa Lafaele had a somewhat rocky start in the tech industry. After getting a degree in Computer Science, she went straight into an internship thinking that she would have all the tools needed to succeed. But as a Pasifika woman, the unconscious racism she faced in her first workplace almost put her off tech altogether.
I always enjoyed technology and computers and I have always loved problem solving. Working as a customer experience specialist at Xero, I had an engaging team and work environment, but I knew my long term career was not in customer experience. However, I would never have guessed that I would one day be developing software for a world leading PropTech company in the sunny Hawkes Bay.
Tia Te Hiko is an awesome wāhine Māori who has been living in Australia for the last few years. After resigning from her job on the Gold Coast, Tia moved back to Aotearoa. In June, she was part of the pilot online bootcamp, and she graduated in October.
In March, like many other businesses, we had to move quickly to ensure the continued safety and wellbeing of our students, team and community. As a software development school, remote working and online collaboration were well within our reach, and our curriculum, content and assessments are already online.
Ellora Virtue travelled home from Scotland for a Bootcamp at Enspiral Dev Academy’s Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland campus — only to have COVID19 send her whole cohort into remote study. She had spent 6 years working overseas, and even began a Business and Management degree at the University of Glasgow. “I started a travel blog, as a lot of people do, and I was curious about how I could personalise it so I wasn’t just using the template. That’s how I first started looking at code.”
In her role as a software developer at ed-tech company StoryPark, not a day goes by that Libby Schumacher-Knight doesn’t use the human skills that she learned at Enspiral Dev Academy (EDA). Before she undertook EDA’s 15 week coding course and bootcamp, Libby was a secondary school teacher, teaching physical education and technology. She had always been an avid user of technology and good at helping others use it, and felt drawn to learn more about how software is created.
When Anna Ulyanova first walked into the Auckland Enspiral Dev Academy campus, she had no idea she was entering “a portal that would open so many doors.” She had completed a degree in Computer Science about five years earlier and having studied hardware, software, coding papers and networking, she thought she had a pretty good sense of what it meant to be a developer.
Math tutor Jae Huh was feeling stuck. She had finished her Bachelor’s of Education and was teaching at a private after school programme after being unable to find work in primary schools. Looking ahead at her career prospects, she found herself thinking “I’m not going anywhere with this.” She enjoyed teaching, but was limited in terms of salary increases, and didn’t want to take the path of starting her own teaching business.
