The summer days were dark for Kateryna. She was looking for work as a web developer, equipped with a degree in IT from the National Aerospace University in Kharkiv, Ukraine. But all she got was rejection letters.
‘I applied for hundreds of jobs,’ she says today. ‘The farthest I got was one rejection letter where they at least specified the reason why they wouldn’t take me – my level of German wasn’t high enough.’
It was 2022, and Kateryna was a long way from her home country. ‘I used to live in Kiev. I remember being woken up one morning at 5a.m. by the sound of explosions. At that point I knew it was time to get out of there.’
Like many fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kateryna underwent an Odyssey of her own to reach safety. Long treks along roads where everything was broken down, bus rides surrounded by tanks and helicopters, shared car trips, shared hotel rooms.
‘All I had was what I had been able to take with me in a hurry: my cat, my laptop, and – for some odd reason which I still can’t quite explain – my little flask of perfume.’
Eventually she found a safe haven in Erkrath, a small town on the outskirts of Düsseldorf, Germany. It was a far cry from the chaos she had just escaped: here nothing greeted the eye of the visitor but elderly couples taking slow walks together, and endless stretches of countryside all around. But she was not in a position to rest. She had a life to rebuild.
But how? Everywhere she turned to find a job, there were only closed doors.
One summer day she took her boyfriend’s bicycle for a ride. ‘I didn’t know how to ride a bike in Ukraine,’ she remembers. ‘It was one of the things I learned to do in Germany, while I was unemployed.’
She rode into a field, past it into another field, past that too until she was in the woods. She found a small bench and sat to take a breather. Looking around, she realized she wasn’t sure where she was anymore. Not in the forest, and not in her life.
‘It was then that I realized I had to change something. I needed to make a decision about my life.’
The next day, she was on the phone with a representative from a WBS CODING SCHOOL Full-Stack Web & App Development Bootcamp, asking how to join their course.
‘I needed to update my IT skills. Also, I needed a certificate that would be recognized here in Germany,’ says Kateryna, ‘And of course, I needed state sponsorship in order to cover the financing. That took some time – and yet, surprisingly, I started seeing the results before I even got in.’
Indeed, just before the bootcamp began, Kateryna got called in for an interview for a position as a Junior .NET Software Developer. She told the company about her background, and about the bootcamp she was about to take.
The response came a few days later. ‘They told me they would hire me,’ she recalls, ‘only if I completed my bootcamp first.’
It was all the motivational speech that Kateryna needed. She threw herself into the bootcamp with everything she had – yet even so, the notoriously intensive nature of modern coding bootcamps was a challenge.
‘At one point I was assigned to a team, and we were asked to deliver a project,’ she says. ‘Things got complicated real fast, we had a deadline to meet, and I ended up sitting in front of my laptop for 12 hours straight, struggling to put together something that worked. I honestly felt like giving up at that point.
‘Then again, I understand why my company wanted me to complete the bootcamp first. That was a taste of what real work in tech sometimes feels like.’
At the same time, the joy of (re-)learning the discipline she had wanted to work with since she was a little girl was undeniable. ‘It was amazing, even with all the work. I felt endlessly fascinated by everything I was learning.
‘The time working on our final project was the best. My teammates were foreigners to Germany like me, so we built a sort of social media for people who wished to play sports. It was inspired by my memories of playing street basketball in Ukraine.’
And so, two weeks after the end of the bootcamp, on a rainy autumn day, Kateryna sat down at her workstation – surrounded with the little things she had been able to bring with her from her home, a coffee-cup holder, a mousepad shaped like Aladdin’s carpet – and started on her first official day as a Junior .NET Software Developer.
‘Some think a bootcamp is like some miracle medicine that will instantly land you a tech job,’ says Kateryna at the end of the interview. ‘The truth is that it just provides the structure, but most of the work has to come from you. You have to be really motivated and really into the idea of working in tech.
‘But if you’re that type of person, well! Just a few months ago I was having an absolutely miserable time, I was jobless and I wasn’t getting anywhere. Today, I’m working the job that I wanted to do since I was a child. And I feel so grateful, to so many people.’
Kateryna Tsyklauri graduated from the WBS CODING SCHOOL Full-Stack Web & App Development Bootcamp in November 2023, and is currently working as a Junior Software Developer.
