My Journey from Zero to Tech

I’ve never really been into the whole corporate stuff. Like, since I decided to study literature, it’s just never been my thing. People have warned me that humanities aren’t gonna get me far in the biz world (yeah, I know, it’s like the basic building block of university or whatever. Without humanity, civilization wouldn’t even exist, blah blah blah), but my love for literature has always been the driving force that pushed me through the struggles.

What made me feel relieved the most back then was that, in the job market, I keep seeing all these interpreter positions that apparently pay pretty well for those who can speak Japanese fluently. I don’t mean to brag or anything but I’ve been speaking Japanese since high school. Starting salaries for these interpreter jobs are supposedly comparable to what people with degrees in medicine or computer science make. When I found this out, I felt pretty proud and confident that I’ll be able to land an awesome job as an interpreter once I graduate.

Everything went according to plan. I landed a job as an Interpreter at one of the biggest automotive manufacturers in Japan, and working there for two years made me realize that this was definitely the job for me. My role was to take information from one language and translate it into another so that both expats and locals could communicate with each other. Don't get me wrong, I loved the job, but part of me couldn't help but wish that everyone could learn each other's language or at least English, which is spoken by over half the world's population. That way, they wouldn't have to rely on me as much for the translation. That's when I realized I could spend my time on something more interesting, so I bought a sh*tload of online courses to upskill myself.

So get this - I quit my job without having any other offers lined up. Sounds pretty crazy, I know. But it all worked out in the end. And just when I started to worry about my decision, I saw one of the biggest online travel agencies out there had opened up a Marketing position that had something to do with their partnership with another OTA in Japan. I spruced up my resume, wrote a killer cover letter, and decided to go for it. The hiring process was a bit of an endless ride, with three interviews that lasted almost a month. But you know what? I got the job. And it’s been amazing ever since.

Well, even though I said the position was in Marketing, it was actually a lot more fluid than that. Trust me, they never just let you do only what's in the job description. They had me doing a ton of different things that totally skyrocketed my learning curve. First off, they had me working with SQL, querying all sorts of data, and creating beautiful dashboards. Lucky for me, I had taken a course on Postgre SQL right before starting the job, so it wasn't too much of a struggle. Then there was this whole landing page creation responsibility that I was in charge of. It took me a bit to get the hang of HTML, but I eventually got there.

So, we also used a CRM tool to organize all the marketing campaigns we need to do - just like most companies do these days. But here's the thing: since this job had a big dependency on our partner company in Japan, we needed to work with people over there who don't have access to our fancy tool. The person who had this job before me set up a way of working using old-school spreadsheets, which is kinda crazy if you ask me. So basically, these guys enter the order on our old-school Excel and then we take it from there and work our magic using our not-so-foolproof back office tool. It’s a bit of a drag, to be honest. That’s why I decided to learn automation and simplify my life a bit.

I had this idea to create a batch job where people could fill out all their campaign requests for the day, and then the automation that I set up could consolidate them at the end of the day by just running a VBA script to extract all the necessary details in a format that our back office tool could support. And just like that, the campaigns would launch magically as scheduled. It was a game-changer. Trust me, you don’t wanna hear all the details 'cause it’s just so boring, even for me at this point. But let me tell you, this whole automation thing was a pretty big deal for someone like me who had zero experience in RPA.

Then here comes the latest skill I earned here - UI design. So, it was a real pain to create this one particular campaign. You had to put all the data into a CSV file, format it just right so that the system would accept it, and then upload it to the back office tool. This whole thing was in its early stages, so the tool didn’t fully support non-IT users yet. If there was something wrong with the data, it wouldn’t even tell you what was wrong - LOL.

But then, the team landed a bunch of great deals with partner companies and needed to create a ton of campaigns. Lucky for us, we had some frontend devs who were happy to help us revamp the whole thing into a user-friendly UI. The only problem was, we didn’t have a product designer on board at that point. So, I stepped up and volunteered myself.

The crazy thing is, the company somehow gave everyone access to Figma. I took one look and knew right away that it wasn’t any more difficult to use than other design tools like Photoshop. So, I got to work and designed it based on the colors and style of our existing back office tool.

Long story short, we had a few showcase sessions with the dev team, and my design was eventually implemented. I've never felt so proud to see something I created come to life!

That’s a wrap for part 1! Thanks for reading to this point. Stay tuned for part 2, where I’ll tell you how I made the move from here to IT consulting, and how it caused me chest pains and completely messed up my sleeping schedule. LOL.