A wanna-be programmer needs some career advise from people who have been there before and are kind enough to lend their opinion about making career steps in IT.
Before I started learning programming I worked in accountancy and banking on administrative positions for about 3 years. More or less 1,5 year ago I started working on some small projects in VBA and got really hooked on. The genuine pleasure of writing code made me think that this was actually the thing I would like to do for a living.
Not having any previous experience in programming I knew that the road to finding employment in this profession would probably be long.
Now it’s been a year and a half since I started and during that time I managed to get some confidence in VBA for Excel which I think I got on a fairly decent level
(I understand arrays, loops, declaring and working with all sorts of variables, general “good practice of coding”, concept of object oriented programming, controlling other windows applications from excel, basics of API, xla addins, etc) I learned couple of things about SQL (parameter queries, table joins, basic statements, sQL in vba).
Although surely there is a lot more to learn in VBA, I am currently thinking about starting on the second programming language and here comes my question : what do you think I should take on next?
Trouble I got with answering that question myself is that even narrowing my choice to the programming languages listed in adverts for the jobs such as Junior Excel/VBA Developer you still get number of different options from C++, C# , VB-VB.NET and RAD, to even JAVA.
As mentioned before I have a background in finance and would like to stay within this area however on a more challenging position that the one I currently have .
At the moment I work as a finance admin in investment banking being involved in pricing pension funds units. Although I do get chances to write something in VBA in this job I think I have reached the point where I really need to, at least see a possible career change on the horizon.
Therefore at this stage it is quite important for me to make a good decision about the 2nd programming language. Ideally I would like to start sending CV’s in about 6 months and by that time reach at least an intermediate level in any 2-nd programming language.
Please let me know your opinions on the direction ou think I should take. Any feedback will be much appreciated.
Before I started learning programming I worked in accountancy and banking on administrative positions for about 3 years. More or less 1,5 year ago I started working on some small projects in VBA and got really hooked on. The genuine pleasure of writing code made me think that this was actually the thing I would like to do for a living.
Not having any previous experience in programming I knew that the road to finding employment in this profession would probably be long.
Now it’s been a year and a half since I started and during that time I managed to get some confidence in VBA for Excel which I think I got on a fairly decent level
(I understand arrays, loops, declaring and working with all sorts of variables, general “good practice of coding”, concept of object oriented programming, controlling other windows applications from excel, basics of API, xla addins, etc) I learned couple of things about SQL (parameter queries, table joins, basic statements, sQL in vba).
Although surely there is a lot more to learn in VBA, I am currently thinking about starting on the second programming language and here comes my question : what do you think I should take on next?
Trouble I got with answering that question myself is that even narrowing my choice to the programming languages listed in adverts for the jobs such as Junior Excel/VBA Developer you still get number of different options from C++, C# , VB-VB.NET and RAD, to even JAVA.
As mentioned before I have a background in finance and would like to stay within this area however on a more challenging position that the one I currently have .
At the moment I work as a finance admin in investment banking being involved in pricing pension funds units. Although I do get chances to write something in VBA in this job I think I have reached the point where I really need to, at least see a possible career change on the horizon.
Therefore at this stage it is quite important for me to make a good decision about the 2nd programming language. Ideally I would like to start sending CV’s in about 6 months and by that time reach at least an intermediate level in any 2-nd programming language.
Please let me know your opinions on the direction ou think I should take. Any feedback will be much appreciated.