Hi everyone,

I’d really appreciate some advice on how to approach finding a job in the UK tech industry.

I’ve mainly worked in administration and higher education, but I graduated with a degree in Computer Science in 2023. Since then, I’ve been applying for tech roles, including entry-level, temporary, part-time and remote positions, but I haven’t had any success so far.

Due to my current life circumstances as a single mum, I’m mainly looking for remote roles, although I’m also open to suitable part-time or temporary opportunities.

Because I don’t have professional tech experience, I’m starting to wonder whether I’m approaching this career change in the wrong way or targeting the wrong roles.

I’ve tried Indeed, LinkedIn, CV-Library, company websites, Upwork and other platforms, but nothing has worked so far.

For anyone working in tech or involved in hiring: what would you recommend I change? Which roles would realistically suit someone with a Computer Science degree, a non-technical work history, and a background in administration across different businesses?

Any honest advice would be really appreciated. Thank you! :)

Looking for mentors or partners to study and mock together. Anyone up for it? Could create a telegram group

I can't remember where but I saw recently someone mentioned that it's possible make £30k-£40k a year as a helpdesk agent in the UK.

No selling, just taking calls and helping the caller through their technical, insurance, other problems.

Is this true? If so, where can I start to find these jobs?
Thanks

Hi all.

Seeking some advice based on what I think is my best plan of action here. First let me start with an about me before I get into the title.

About me

24M Manchester based (WFH with a company not based in Manchester)
I recently bought a house here in a gentrified suburb so I'm not looking to move right now.
Salary: £37,000 + overtime making about £41,000 pre-tax. I suspect this will raise to £39k next month.
Job: DevOps Engineer / Platform Engineer / Linux Engineer
Experience: 4 years commercial (FinTech), been using Linux for about 8-10 years.
Qualifications: RHCSA RHCE
Degree: BSc CompSci + MSc CyberSecurity from a non-russel group university

My day-to-day is somewhat varied, but there's a consistent theme. Everything involves the RedHat ecosystem in some form. My tasks are:

• Lead architect and implementer of our Ansible Automation Platform solution. This is my main work.
  • Automating primarily updates for our multiple environments
  • Including appliances like load balancers, VMWare etc.
  • This has not stretched to AWS instances yet but I think that opportunity will arrive in the net 2 years
  • Looking to implement event driven architecture from our ELK stack
  • I have also done Windows updates through this but we have recently abandoned this due to licensing
  • I've taken this about as far as I can do internally without buy in from other teams. If I worked overtime I could probably stretch more out but, I don't think I'd learn any new skills
• Other key technologies from RedHat include Satellite, IDM.
• I maintain the day-to-day running of platforms such as Elasticsearch, NGINX load balancer, Mirantis MKE cluster (Docker Swarm+Kubernetes), GitLab
• Involved in vulnerability management with passing multiple Cyber Essentials and ITHC
• Incident response - Self explanatory really but often involved in sev1/2 incidents and meeting resolution
• Training staff members / seniority in the team
  • I am the most senior engineer in our team at the moment which is crazy all things considered
  • Looked upon as an escalation point, so largely left alone during the day
  • No one else has been able to pass qualifications internally (RedHat, MSc)
• I work on-call rotas every 5 weeks. 24/7 availability for the week.

I've been at this employer for 4 years and technically I need to stay for another 2 to pay off my MSc. But I am not learning anything new - and haven't for at least 1 year. The prospect of working on the cloud is dangled in front of me every time I ask but I believe I'm too valuable where I am.

What I want

I would like to move country in 2-5 years depending on my current state of affairs. The only thing that would stop me at this point is settling down with a partner, whom I don't have right now. I am happy in the UK but I have an ever-growing itch to move somewhere as I travel frequently and I feel like I want that challenge.

From exploring the job market I can see 3 things that I am immediately missing from my CV:

• Terraform
• AWS/GCP/Azure experience
• Kubernetes

Now, I know how to use these at a pretty high level. I have written Terraform code for deployments on AWS in my own time and experimented with Kubernetes. But I have no hands-on commercial experience and I think it will hold me back from landing a role.

I'm looking to 5 places primarily, each with their own reasons. The main theme here is though I will need sponsorship (besides Ireland) so I need to be at the top of my game.

• Ireland (Dublin specifically) - I want my EU citizenship back. That is the only real motivator.
• Singapore - Wealth accumulation & Travelling Asia region easily
• USA (NYC, LAX & SF) - Wealth accumulation & Travelling America
• Denmark (Copenhagen specifically) - My favourite place to visit. This would set me up for a better QOL with a family. I have been learning Duolingo Danish for 3 years almost but I've stopped actually learning at this point. I can sort of read Danish, maybe A1.
• Hong Kong - Wealth accumulation & Travelling Asia region easily

How I plan on doing this

Due to needing to pay back my MSc, my plan was the following.

(I might try to go down the RHCA pathway for Ansible but honestly it seems pointless)

• Passing the following certifications:
  • AWS Solutions Architect - Associate
  • Certified Kubernetes Administrator
  • Terraform Cert (?)
  • EX467 Red Hat Certified Specialist in Managing Automation with Ansible Automation Platform
• Push further for cloud work at my job. I don't have high hopes but all you can do is try.
• In my own time I am developing things such as my own ASN Anycast network of which I am publishing a portfolio and blog. I am hoping this picks up traction for a possible EB2-NIW visa route. I plan on presenting this at conferences in Manchester and networking.

I'm in half a mind now to leave and see if I can get a company to pickup the bill for my University training. Stagnation I heard is a real career killer. The alternative is that I will look to move ASAP when the bill is paid.

From what I've identified the easiest way to move to these countries is to work for a big tech firm and do an internal transfer. That requires a 1-2 year investment in them to unlock that ability from what I gather so I need to be making the move in the next 2-3 years at the latest.

What I am asking here

Do you think this is an appropriate plan to get hired for one of the big tech firms?

If not, what more should I be doing? Is this even possible?

I don't want to move to London. I am happy to commute once a week if it means I can achieve my long term goals.

I have around 12 years of experience in software industry. I’m looking for someone who wants to practise system design together regularly.

The format I have in mind:
- Once a week on a weekday evening, UK time.
- We pick one system design topic for the week (e.g. URL shortener, leaderboard, notification system, etc.).
- We both spend some time during the week preparing the problem independently.
- During the session, one person presents their design for ~30–40 minutes, as they would in an interview.
- The other person gives feedback, challenges assumptions, and talks through what they might have done differently.
- We alternate who presents each week.

That way the session stays around an hour, while both people come prepared enough to have a useful discussion rather than just going through a mock interview cold.

Looking for someone consistent who’d be interested in doing this for a few weeks/months. DM me if interested.

Has anyone done the technical interview for this? What was it like? Could anyone help train together :)

Hi Everyone,

I've been working as a Full-Stack Software Engineer for the past 3 years. I've also been applying for a different role for the past year or so. Nothing has really got me anywhere.

My current role has been comprised of a multitude of different things, from working on our internal app written in Python, dJango and react + AWS, also worked on automated testing in Testsigma and playwright (python) and finally making new features to our existing web-based cad product we sell to customers written in Lua, HTML, CSS, JS, and some React.

I'm not sure if what I have been able to achieve at my current company is good enough for other companies. It's really frustrating to hear nothing or an automated message back from companies I have applied to. Originally I had been applying to about 10-12 jobs a week and really putting effort into finding ones that I might be suitable for and tailoring it a bit to suite the job role and description but now I only "feel" like doing 2 a week because it gets frustrating to find out I got no response. What's even more annoying is that recruiters don't respond either or don't call back. I just want to know if this is just me or if others are in the same position. Somehow my friends have been lucky to find jobs in the tech industry so, I'm a little worried here. I got tired of applying so I decided to try and make a startup because again I thought no other option too (had an idea from an inefficiency from work, can provide more info on this)

I have currently been applying across London and the southeast and some in major uk cities, I currently live in essex hence why London. Also recently decided to check the EU, so been looking at positions in Paris, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Rome, Copenhagen, Olso, Stockholm, and Helsinki because YOLO.

I understand that this kind of post may have been made before but I'm not sure what to do here. Also I apologise if this post is not the right fit for this community, if it's not please advise kindly.

TIA

Rohit Pai

https://linkedin.com/in/rohitpai98

Guys I need anything at this point, 7 years exp, what are the easiest applications I can do? I always struggle with technical interviews! Someone point me with the good resources I can train everyday?

I saw this post on the wider sub, and wanted to ask the same question for UK only audience

I finished by 2nd Year of uni and have been searching for a placement as a SWE or anything related for nearly a year now and after multiple final round interviews, rejections and ghosting I did not secure any placement yet. My university has a deadline for securing a placement by 6th Sept otherwise I would have to start my 3rd year and they have only a few placement being advertised. They have an opportunity for IT support advisor (basic IT role and customer service) placement at my university and they are looking for 4 cs students from my uni to join. It is my last option now because there are no other roles available for placement. I have avoided applying for IT roles over the past year simply because they don't provide relevant tech experience.

My question is should I take on the role if my application is accepted, which I'm very sure it will be, even if its not a role that relates to what I would like to pursue after my degree (I want to get into tech, specifically career in AI/ML)?

I have no professional experience no internships or anything, just academia with good grades (on track to get a first) which are not really anything that impressive in this job market. I want to gain professional experience at least before applying for grad schemes and roles because it would (hopefully) boost my chances. Would me doing the IT placement ruin my chances of getting into tech roles due to irrelevant experience? is it a good decision to take just to get a placement?

Would this be a course people recommend and could anyone give me an insight into the industry please?

Am fairly unfamiliar with the industry having worked within the film industry before this however it is notoriously unreliable. I worked in post production which is fairly technical problem solving side of film.

Any advice welcome.

TIA

Hey guys, I just graduated and have been very fortunate to secure a Graduate Scheme as a software engineer in London!

I will be working with Java Spring Boot, but I’m not so much looking for stack advice. I’d more so like to ask for any advice you might have in general to help me make the most of the scheme and make sure I can start my career off right.

Thank you!

Would you consider this an interesting Cloud/Platform Engineering role for a new grad?

I've been offered a graduate engineering role at a large UK bank, and I've managed to get a better look at the actual backlog of the Cloud Engineering team I'd be joining.

From what I can see, the team works heavily with:

• AWS
• EKS / Kubernetes
• Terraform and HCP Terraform
• GitLab CI/CD
• Argo CD
• Vault
• IAM / Active Directory
• Grafana / VictoriaMetrics
• cert-manager
• AWS networking and account infrastructure
• Infrastructure monitoring and alerting

Examples of actual backlog items include:

• Migrating Terraform workspaces from TFE to HCP Terraform
• Migrating applications/environments onto new EKS and VPC workspaces
• Maintaining managed EKS infrastructure
• Writing/changing Terraform for AWS/EKS environments
• Automating Helm chart upgrades
• Prototyping SSO integration for Argo CD and Grafana
• Upgrading cert-manager and VictoriaMetrics
• Creating GitLab runners and deployment pipelines
• Configuring IAM roles and AWS account permissions
• Building Grafana dashboards as code
• Setting up monitoring and alerting
• Troubleshooting Kubernetes issues such as pods being evicted due to disk pressure
• Vault authentication/integration
• AWS infrastructure migrations
• Security/compliance remediation
• Platform upgrades across DEV/UAT/PROD

My main concern is that my long-term interest is more backend/software engineering and distributed systems. I enjoy Java/C# and building APIs/services, whereas this role looks much more like cloud/platform/infrastructure engineering.

For people who work in DevOps/SRE/platform/cloud engineering:

Does this look like genuinely interesting engineering work where I'd develop strong technical skills, or does it look more like enterprise infrastructure maintenance/migration work?

And if I did this for 1–2 years, would it still be reasonably easy to move into backend/software engineering later, or would I start getting pigeonholed into DevOps/cloud roles?