From MA in Comparative Religion to RPA-Developer

I wrote an obscure master thesis on gender subversion in the writings of the Desert Fathers. Surprise surprise, this was not something that gave me the skill set needed for a job. As a result, I went unemployed for a year until I was lucky enough to get a job as a university admissions officer. This job was not a good fit for me in that it was very repetitive and consisted mainly of me pre-screening applicants and making sure that all required documentation was present.

I was bored at my job and my self-esteem took a hit. Had I spent 5 years at university without gaining any useful skills? A friend of mine, an Economist, suggested that I taught myself Python. "It is easy," he said and explained to me the basics and that there were a lot of cool jobs to be had. So, I tried my hands on Python. Signed up for the online learning platform Treehouse and ventured into the world of online programming tutorials.

After 6 months of online tutorials with Python, I gave up. I would often spend several hours trying to get a script to work before figuring out that my computer used Python 2.7 instead of Python 3 (to the uninitiated, the two versions are not completely compatible). I would spend hours trying to get various libraries to work with no luck. I concluded that programming was not for me and that I was meant to be doing the repetitive job I was already doing.

A year passed and my brother suggested that I took up frontend development instead. My brother is a PHP developer, and quite successful. I had never seen myself as a designer but more as a "theoretically minded" person. But hey, why not give it a try? I signed up for Treehouse again and started learning front-end development. And it was actually great! I didn't have the same issues with libraries not working or versions of Javascript not be compatible. Everything I made was immediately visible in the browser, which motivated me to keep on learning.

Now, my story is not one of those "I lost my job due to Covid, taught myself to code and 6 months later I am now starting as a software engineer". Even though I really liked frontend development I would periodically stop my learning due to several factors:

• Doubt: can I really learn this well enough to be hired by someone
• Procrastination: Javascript is hard, I think I will just study harder tomorrow
• Tired: I had my first child during this time and sleep deprivation was definitely getting to me

After roughly 2 years of on-and-off coding, my employer ventured into this new trend of Robotic Process Automation. The strategy was to teach people from the administration how to use the platform KofaxRPA (formerly know as KofaxKapow) to automate their own tasks as well as other people in the office. I immediately jumped on this opportunity and became a certified KofaxRPA developer.

My hopes of building RPA-solutions were, in unfortunately, halted quite a bit because my superior did not see the potential of RPA and would therefore not prioritize it. This meant that I want not given much time towards automating tasks with KofaxRPA.

Becoming fulltime focused on RPA

After yet another two years, and one more child, I was hired as an RPA-Project manager/-developer for a municipality. I was so excited to finally be working with RPA as my main job and not just as a small non-prioritized part of it. I am still amazed that they took the chance of hiring me for the team and I am loving every day I get to spend within the field of RPA-development.

I am putting my soft skills to work when talking to process owners about their day-to-day work and automation potential, then translating that to process flows with BPMN charts and getting the IT department involved. I am also developing my technical skills by diving into the inner workings of websites, API's, JavaScript etc.

For a person with a non-technical background that spent a lot of time acquiring some level of programming skills, RPA-development is truly a great entry point. A "real" programmer are surely able to create much more complex and stable software robots, but they often lack the soft skills and patience needed to talk with non-programmers.

Do you have a non-technical background and want to get a job closely related to programming, I would strongly advise you to look into RPA-development. This is still a fairly new category that sits between hardcore programming and drag-and-drop programs. Being able to analyse, document and create good working relationships across the company is just as valuable a skill as knowing a lot of JavaScript or Python.