When it came to his communications career, Matt Wojtkun had it all.
Wojtkun had successfully navigated an illustrious PR career in D.C., eventually landing the role of vice president at Weber Shandwick, a major national public relations firm. That wasn't the only career highlight, with stints as a press secretary to a top Democratic congresswoman, volunteer with multiple campaigns and employee with major government organizations on his CV.
However, Wojtkun wanted more, and began thinking about whether he wanted to stay in the communications world for his next career step.
“As a front-end developer, you have to put yourself in the audience’s position and figure out how users are interacting with your product and how people are thinking."
He discovered that he wanted more. So, in the later stages of his PR career, Wojtkun took up coding.
“About a year before I signed up for a boot camp, I started learning code on my own,” he said. “My big question I wanted to answer was, did I actually have the aptitude for it?”
He did realize that he had the passion for it.
“It’s hard to know what you want to do every single day of your life,” he said. “But I knew I was on to something when I would get up early in the morning for two and a half hours BEFORE my other job, and would get so frustrated [to go to work] because all I wanted to do was learn to code.”
HTML, CSS and JavaScript were all on his educational docket. But Wojtkun knew he needed some sort of additional training, the formal kind.
Eventually, he decided on New York Code and Design Academy after considerable research on offerings and pricing.
He was originally skeptical of such programs, wondering if they were legitimate.
“I was thinking it is so much money for one shot at changing your career,” he said. “Now I realize they’re a gateway into the tech field. I mean, you can’t have a company without a website. These boot camps are two to three years of computer science education in two months.”
When he got started, Wojtkun found he was ahead of some of his classmates early on by virtue of his at-home coding practice beforehand. While he struggled with the back-end part of development, he felt like he was doing something amazing.
“You really have to learn how to learn again," he said.
Fast-forward to the end of Wojtkun's boot camp experience, where not but two weeks after graduating, he landed a job at Hatch Apps as a front-end developer.
It's a company that helps companies build apps for their businesses, and he found it via a networking visit put on by the boot camp. It then turned into an informal interview.
“They said I should apply, and within 20 minutes I had put together a resume, and joined the company two weeks after boot camp.”
Wojtkun hit the (coding) ground running, as he was tasked with completely rebuilding the marketing website for the company. Additionally, he had to learn both React and Vue, two programs he had little to no experience in.
Ever a communicator, Wojtkun not only relied on what he learned at the boot camp to learn React, but he also used his connections to help him get the knowledge he needed: some of the back-end developers he knew from a billiards league. They had previously used React to make an app for 70 players in order to build a better schedule for their billiards races, rather than relying on paper and pencil.
It goes to show that while he’s fully immersed in the tech world, Wojtkun hasn’t forgotten his roots. He says he relies on his communication skills a lot more than anyone would think.
“As a front-end developer, you have to put yourself in the audience’s position and figure out how users are interacting with your product and how people are thinking," he said. “Employers don’t want to see a robot who can code. They want someone who can be a human being to make a project successful.”
