Andrea Caviglia was not easily confused, but as his team-member’s voice droned on from the other side of the video call, he had to admit to himself a simple truth:
I don’t have the slightest clue what this person is talking about.
Andrea was working as Project Manager for DEPT, an ecommerce company. He was supposed to coordinate a team of programmers, but he found himself constantly hamstrung by one unfortunate fact: he knew nothing about web development.
‘It was not the first time either,’ says Andrea today. ‘I’d studied International Business at the HTW technical school in Berlin, and I was beginning to develop a career as project manager. I worked for N26, for Audible, for TaxFix and for Dept. But I didn’t know the first thing about programming, and this was a wall I kept coming up against, again and again.’
Conscious that something had to change, Andrea wanted to upskill – but the precise how was something he wasn’t quite sure about. ‘I didn’t just want any random course. I told myself that it had to be something that worked well with my existing background, that would offer me future-proof skills, and that would help me find more work.’
He wondered for a long time about what to do, and he remembered an episode from his previous company. ‘They needed someone to do UI, and they hired this girl whose only qualification was that she had completed a bootcamp in the field. I really thought, wow. You can seriously do a tech bootcamp and find a job right away.’
Andrea remembered how clueless he felt during his calls with programmers. And he decided it was time to change that.
‘I did weeks, months of research before choosing my bootcamp,’ he remembers. ‘I would fill in spreadsheets to compare all of their features, I would take these long walks through Hasenheide while reflecting on the question.’
In the end Andrea went for a WBS CODING SCHOOL Full-Stack Web & App Development Bootcamp. ‘Other bootcamps were 8-9 weeks long, but I liked that this one was longer and went into greater depth. Plus I checked the reviews, and they were excellent. I decided to take the plunge.’
And so, in December of 2023, Andrea first sat down with an online class filled with people both like and unlike him, and found himself writing the first lines of software in his life.
‘I was immediately hooked by the design side of web development,’ he recalls with a smile. ‘I also naturally shifted back into my project management habits: when they split us into teams, I found myself taking everyone under my wing, assigning tasks, making plans.
‘The onsite campus phase at the end of the bootcamp was the best part, but also the most gruelling. Not that the instructors asked or expected us to work any overtime, naturally, but my team and I got so involved in our final project that we ended up working on it non-stop. I remember we were together in that campus workspace often until past midnight.’
None of this hard work tainted the memory of the bootcamp for Andrea – to the contrary. ‘The bootcamp experience was just fantastic, so much better than I could ever have imagined! It was super fun from the beginning until the end, I learned an insane amount of new things, it opened so many doors for me professionally, and I even met a bunch of really cool people!’
Like the UI girl he had seen such a long time ago, Andrea now emerged from the bootcamp and started working right away. ‘I already had two job offers before the bootcamp was even over. One of the jobs I’d found myself by searching for it while studying. The other one, I didn’t even have to look. I was contacted by a headhunter who found my profile on LinkedIn.’
Many who take a coding bootcamp do so to change careers, but Andrea’s plan from the beginning was to upskill in his field. Today he is once again doing project management for an agency called Latori and he is still very closely involved with programmers, but he has come a long, long way from those clueless phone calls of old.
‘The bootcamp didn’t just open the doors of software-related project management,’ he says. ‘I now have a better feeling in general, I know what my programmers are doing, I can follow the logic of what they’re saying, I know how long tasks will take and how to organise them.
‘And of course, I know how to do programming myself. If I want to, I can get my hands dirty and do the web development work in person. The bootcamp didn’t just teach me how to write code, it also taught me how to research and learn new things in the tech field.’
None of that, however, means that Andrea’s journey is over. ‘You never really stop learning,’ he says, with satisfaction in his eyes. ‘I know that the things I learned will yield yet more opportunities in the future, that they will take me to new places yet. But for now, I am a better project manager than I was before. And that was exactly what I wanted.’
