An 8-month journey to Front-End
Vadim Khlystun took courses for six months and received an offer two months later. The Front-End Developer moved from Belarus to the USA, continues to grow in the profession, and today tells his story of getting into IT especially for the Anywhere Club blog.
How it all began
— As a child, I really wanted to become a famous football player. But even though I didn’t fulfill my dream, sport still plays a big role in my life, Vadim explains.
I was born in Minsk, and graduated from the Physics Department of the Belarusian State University. I worked as a System Administrator, then as an ABAP Developer. Since I did not have a special IT education, I had to study a lot on my own: I read books and took online courses. The most important thing that I learned from that period of my life is that if you want to be at your best, you need to constantly keep yourself in good technical shape, and not be afraid to learn new disciplines.
Getting into the EPAM UpSkill program
— Many of my friends worked — and still work — at EPAM. All of them shared their positive experiences of working in the company. They talked about career opportunities, continuous learning, and team cohesion. One of them spoke about the recruitment in EPAM UpSkill for their Front-End Development Program. I learned that the program was not limited to employees of the company. Before that, I had little experience in website layout. I decided this would be a good opportunity to change my specialization, which I had actually thought about for a long time. I wanted to change first, because Front-End is one of the areas that is in great demand, regardless of location and industry, and second, because I studied JavaScript a little in the past before starting the course. Of course, I wanted to deepen my knowledge and get advice and recommendations from experts. This is how my journey as a Front-End Developer began.
How was the training?
— The entire course from start to finish took 6 months. On average, I spent about 30 hours a week preparing. This is certainly a lot.
During our course people became very close friends thanks to the instructors, who not only helped us gain excellent knowledge, but also rallied us as a team. It was easy enough to do the homework since the material was well presented and discussed. Of the complex topics, I can name Application State Management with Redux and some sections of Typescript.
What happened next
— The strongest motivation for me was the possibility of getting a new job offer. It took a couple of months from the end of the course to the receipt of the offer, during which time I passed several interviews for various projects. Of course, while my new knowledge was fresh in my mind, it was relatively easy to pass interviews, says Vadim.
Long before taking the EPAM UpSkill program, I moved to the USA. At the moment, I work in a team that develops an e-commerce site for a large cosmetic company. We use the same toolkit that we studied during the course: Javascript + ReactJS + Redux. In the future, I plan to develop towards a full stack developer.
The main advice that I would like to give to those who want to change their field of activity is: don’t be afraid of change and find good teachers.
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