Jet-lagged and completely exhausted, Lakisha Adu stepped out of the Berlin Brandenburg airport, welcoming the familiar sounds of her mother tongue. She was back from a trip to Thailand, where she’d gone rock-climbing and scuba diving, but it had been more than just a holiday for her – it was also a journey to find herself, at a moment in time when a giant question mark hung over her career.
‘I was working as Events Manager,’ she says today, ‘then the Covid pandemic came, and I lost my job. I found a new one as a Marketing Manager at a start-up, then one day the owner decided he wanted to do something else, and I lost that job too. I wanted new work – but at that point, I also wanted new skills.’
Although job stability was hard to come by, her experience of work in different settings also provided some prompts for what else she could do next.
‘When I was working at the start-up, I learned so, so much. There were less than a dozen of us in there, and we all had to figure out how everything worked by ourselves. After a while, I found myself explaining technical stuff to my team-members – and that was the first time that I felt like I had a knack for this stuff.’
And so, when her job at the start-up was spirited away under her eyes and she was forced to confront the question of what to do next, the options were very many. Perhaps more than she was prepared for.
‘Working in a marketing role had shown me many new possibilities I had not considered. I thought of a position as an SEO Specialist, for example. But mainly, what fascinated me was data. Analysing it, figuring out what it says, making decisions based on it.
‘In fact, I’d long had the feeling that when it came to managing data, companies either had a specialist working strictly in that role, or else… well, or else they had nobody. So there was room to find work there, particularly for one who already had some interdisciplinary skills.’
Some months of self-reflection later, inclusive of her time away from everything in Thailand, she returned and asked her job centre if they’d be willing to sponsor a tech bootcamp.
‘I told them I was considering three providers,’ she says with an amused smile, ‘and they practically told me to just pick whichever one I liked best and they’d cover its cost! They were quite familiar with bootcamps as a means to find employment, and they were easily convinced.
‘There were quite a few options to choose from. In the end I picked WBS CODING SCHOOL because it seemed like the most professional. The other places immediately tried to get me to sign up, while WBS had a process to go through, an initial challenge, an interview to get in. It felt more selective, and frankly more serious.’
And so, in April of 2023, Lakisha signed up for a WBS CODING SCHOOL Marketing Analytics Bootcamp, looking to upgrade her portfolio of skills.
‘I already had a foundation in marketing, so the first couple of weeks were pretty easy. At a certain point though, the level picked up – and then there was no time to lounge about. Learning how to write JavaScript code in particular was a massive pain in the neck.’
The efforts paid off, however, and Lakisha didn’t even have to wait until the end of the bootcamp: she was called for an interview for a Marketing Analyst internship during the final week of her studies.
‘I didn’t wait until the end of the bootcamp to send out applications,’ she says. ‘I have to say, the school’s Career Services were also very helpful. They had already revised my CV and my LinkedIn profile, and when they learned that I had an interview coming up, they helped me prepare for it.’
Shortly after her graduation, during a trip to Dresden with her mother, Lakisha received a phone call – she was offered the position!
Today Lakisha is living in Barcelona, where she is completing her internship with eDreams ODIGEO.
‘My work today is more technical,’ she says. ‘I’m no longer writing posts for social media and stuff like that. Now I’m working with spreadsheets, with BigQuery, Power BI. Marketing itself is becoming a lot more technical, so I think for someone like me, who had an interest in data but no formal education in it, upskilling with a bootcamp really made sense.
‘The next step in my plan is to go from an internship to a full role as a Data Analyst. While I work to make that happen, though, I’m more than happy to enjoy Barcelona.’
Lakisha Adu graduated from a WBS CODING SCHOOL Marketing Analytics Bootcamp in August 2023, and is currently working as a Marketing Analyst Intern for eDreams ODIGEO.
