"Le Wagon provided a great community with a lot of resources and mentors to pull from. I think using this to my advantage was very helpful when transitioning from a non-tech role to a more tech-oriented role."
About Kris
Born in Sweden and raised abroad, Kris has experienced many places and cultures. He can speak fluent Swedish, Spanish, French, English, and Chinese while he’s also worked in multiple industries ranging from HR, Wellness, Fashion, and Consulting.
He recently transitioned his career from a small lifestyle consulting agency to one of China’s largest tech companies - Tencent.
The importance of transitioning
Most of Kris‘ early work experience was in traditional industries like recruitment. Later on, he transitioned to healthcare, working in Sales and in lifestyle consulting as a business developer. Successful transition happens when you are able to find the transferable skill. Which, until then, was communication and networking.
However, transitioning into technology-related industries requires more than just soft skills. Candidates usually need to have specific hard skills and proven experience or projects related to the job they are applying for. Kris thought those types of jobs are only accessible to people who graduated with a Computer Science Major. As an International Relations & Economics graduate, his talent has been only leveraged in HR and sales until his last job.
Taking a decision
Before Le Wagon, Kris was working as a Project Manager in a small Shanghai Consulting firm. During this time, he had the opportunity to collaborate with many IT vendors on a variety of customer-oriented projects. Kris always felt it was interesting to sit in meetings with these IT teams and hear their briefings about their shared client’s digital strategy.
Through this exposure, along with a slowdown of work due to the pandemic, Kris settled on the idea of boosting his technical skills and enrolling in a program at Le Wagon.
“After attending a few events with Le Wagon, I realized I had several friends in the Le Wagon community. Based on the positive feedback of these friends and witnessing their own career development, it was an easy choice to enroll in a Bootcamp. ”
Kris’ Experience at Le Wagon
Kris knew that he couldn’t quit his job and attend the Full-Time program. Instead, he joined Le Wagon’s Part-Time Bootcamp, meaning he could both continue working and take the program during his off-hours.
Throughout the 24-week part-time Bootcamp, Kris learned to build a Web Application, build a WeChat Mini Program and many other Web Development skills and tools.
In the last two weeks of the Bootcamp Kris and his team built an application that allowed users to upload, store, and share flashcards.
“During the program, I learned a valuable lesson on what it was like to manage a team and ship a real digital application. I had done something similar in my previous job, but actually taking part in the development, writing code, enhancing the design, and deploying the final product was very different and challenging in a great way. ”
Kris’ Transition to Big Tech
His initial goal was to apply his learnings to his former job by helping keep a lot of the tech-related outsourced projects in-house. However, as time went by he decided to dream bigger and work directly in the tech industry. 4 months after graduation, Kris leveraged his previous working experience, newfound coding skills, and the Le Wagon community to secure a job at one of China’s largest tech companies - Tencent.
“Le Wagon provided a great community with a lot of resources and mentors to pull from. I think using this to my advantage was very helpful when transitioning from a non-tech role to a more tech-oriented role."
What's next?
Currently, Kris is a Recruitment Manager at Tencent Games. He handles the hiring process for many of the technical roles within game development in the company overseas. Because he is one of the more technical recruiters, he sometimes handles some of the internal systems and figures out technical solutions to problems they have.
Although he doesn't code daily at his new job, he still believes learning to code has had a significant impact.
"Coding has provided me with an “engineering mindset”. I’m able to more easily maintain a detailed view of the big picture while diving into the intricacies of any problem."
Thank you, Kris!
