I shared this experience on a close Facebook group and seems to inspire a lot of people, so I decide to share it here and hope it encourages more people going through a similar experience.

It’s not news that it’s really hard to be black, it’s, even more, harder to be black and a first-generation immigrant.

I went to Flatiron school so broke I don’t even have the rent for two weeks in London, I started out living in hostels outside London, my school is in central London in a We Work facilities. That means long hours of the bus in the morning and long hours of the bus back to the hostel.

That means a very short night, to be able to save money for the hostel, I will stay on campus to work overnight if you know We Work facilities they use to have phone boots sometimes I sleep in the phone boots overnight. Wake up early to freshening up and get ready for the day.

Because I was on a very low budget I eat once a day, coffee, chocolate and biscuits are always available on Campus that’s what I will take for breakfast. I will buy lunch that I will eat part of it during the day and the remaining at night.

Before moving to the UK I have been working in Tech in Nigeria, I have international Diploma in computing with distinction, I have BBA in IT Security, I have about 5 years work experience in Nigeria, international fellowship and all. But all these are not enough to break into the UK tech ecosystem. As a new immigrant, you have this curse placed on you zero UK experience.

I have heard a lot of people talk about how limiting this can be, and no matter how impressive your CV might be not having a UK experience can be the roadblock between you and your first-time job offers.

For I have tried all I can to mitigate against that at least to the best of my knowledge I was volunteering for the British Redcross, I also join the Amnick Social Enterprise work experience program. Then I started applying for every position in my line of skills, at a point I was even applying for the least entry jobs. I even applied to the post of a WordPress content manager that’s a fancy name for posting content on a WordPress site and data entry for e-commerce websites. I didn’t even get a callback.

After many applications I started getting some calls, some after the calls it’s when they ask of my UK experience. There was one that went through and I was giving an invite to come to a physical interview the position was for a WordPress Developer at an agency it was really a great interview, then they sent me a mock-up to build a complete WordPress theme, I did about 70% of the job within the three days time frame. I code everything from scratch they said it’s not enough, I could have use Bootstrap 😊.

Some interviews I will get feedback like the company serves business that has a turn over of millions of pounds, and that I have not work on a project of that capacity so they are not moving forward with me. Million pounds business coming from Nigeria: that is just a nice way of telling you you don’t have UK experience.

#inspiration #job-hunting #coding #codingbootcamp #life-lessons