Reclaiming a Career in QA And Time for Her Family: Wendy Zambrano’s TripleTen Story

It would be a mistake to assume a bootcamp is just about a career change. Yes, this is what bootcamps focus on, but the career change is only a means to achieving something else much more radical. 

And in every case, that something else is a better life.

What that looks like can differ. In that better life, maybe you wake up more energized because you feel like you’re doing something challenging, rewarding, and meaningful. Maybe you’re less isolated because your job fosters a sense of camaraderie and community among you and your colleagues. Maybe you gain the space and resources to pursue both professional and personal goals — like spending more time with your family.

Or, as is the case with Wendy Zambrano, maybe a better life involves all of the above. Here’s how TripleTen gave her the tech skills and knowledge that helped her achieve the life she’d been aspiring to.

Calls, but not her calling

Initially, Wendy had planned on working in education, so she got a degree in teaching biology and chemistry from a university in her native Venezuela. However, soon after she graduated, she decided to move, and with that, she had to rethink a few things. “I went to live in the Philippines,” she said. “And since I couldn't work there as a teacher, I started working as an agent in the call center industry.”

But while there, she found out she’d be returning to the western hemisphere. “My husband was working as well in the Philippines in the mortgage industry. He was a manager there. And then they decided that they needed a manager here. So they transferred all of us to the US.”

She migrated once again. But in her time in the Philippines, she’d also progressed in her career — no longer was she just handling calls. When she landed in the States, she was instead spending more time on quality assurance (QA). “I was doing quality assurance for the Spanish team — just checking calls, emails, reporting bugs, and helping in other stuff and in other projects,” she said. But it didn’t last. “However, the market was changing a lot, and then they had to lay off a lot of people. I was one of them.”

She went back to what she knew — working for a call center. It was grueling.

I would take calls from 9:00 a.m. to 6 p.m. non-stop. It was back-to-back. Wendy Zambrano, TripleTen grad

This schedule kept her from being as present for her family_{Why Tech is For Moms} as she’d like. And not only that, but the conversations themselves could be difficult: “I had a hard time with customers because of my accent. I was taking calls for American customers and sometimes they would not understand me or they wouldn't like my accent.”

She needed to make a change. And she already knew where she wanted to go: “I wanted to do something that I really love, which is quality [assurance],” she said.

But she looked at her skills, looked at the market, and understood she needed to augment her QA chops: “I wanted something that would teach me more about the technical process and how to read information that I didn’t know how to read,” she said. She started researching, and TripleTen came up. “I saw that in the program there would be SQL, JavaScript, all those programming languages that would be helpful for me”

Following a conversation with one of our career advisors, she enrolled in TripleTen’s QA program.

Recommitting to QA

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Wendy knew the bootcamp would ask a lot of her, and she responded with commensurate dedication. “There were moments when I dedicated a whole afternoon if I had the time or a whole evening from 7:00 p.m. to 11 — even when I had been working the whole day already,” she said.

And this commitment helped her through, even when she encountered something harder to wrap her head around such as SQL_{How Long Does It Take to Learn SQL?}.

SQL was something that had always been very hard for me to understand, and once we [got to it] in the program, I worked on the queries and learned exactly how it works. I understood the big picture of SQL. Wendy Zambrano, TripleTen grad

In addition, any time she faced something she needed clarification on, she could find help from the tutors. And that included later at night: “Even at 11 p.m., the moment when I could actually sit down and my kids were already sleeping, I could dedicate time to talk to the tutor and explain, ‘Okay this is what I cannot do. I'm stuck here. What can I do to fix it?’”

Importantly, the tutor wouldn’t just give her the answer, but instead guide her to discover the solution for herself. “It was a ‘Don't give me a fish, but teach me how to fish’ kind of way of working,” she said.

This, in combination with the learn-by-doing teaching format, kept her eager to discover what else QA had in store.

You get to learn something and apply it right away, and then once you're doing the validations, once you are really using the program and making your own code and finding bugs, it's very motivating because you see real results right away. Wendy Zambrano, TripleTen grad

So as she finished up her time at the bootcamp, she was ready to start looking for a job. There was a twist, though: it was around that time that she found out she was pregnant with her third child.

No longer choosing between career and family

So the support Wendy got from her career coach_{Career Coaching at TripleTen: What It Is and How It Helps You Land a Job} was crucial.

I was having some emotional roller coasters, and [my coach] was there for that and showed me the support that I needed to keep moving and to keep applying and to keep looking even if my personal life was hard at the moment. Wendy Zambrano, TripleTen grad

Not only did the career coach give her pep talks and keep her going — she also made sure that the application process would be effective. See, Wendy had a resume, but it needed a bit of work: “I had my resume already, but then when I showed it to her, we were able to identify all the issues that I had. It didn't have the right format. It didn't have the right wording. And it had information that wasn't needed or information that was missing.”

With her career coach, she honed her resume into something that would draw the eyes of recruiters. In addition, they came together and built out a plan to make sure the jobs she was applying for were the right jobs.

So she started sending in applications. Getting rejection letters was difficult, but she kept going — not only for her own sake, but to set an example for her children, too.

I always thought, ‘Okay I'm doing this because I want something better for [my kids]. Because I want to teach them as well that you have to work hard to get things and you just find the strength somewhere inside you.’ Wendy Zambrano, TripleTen grad

Her persistence paid off. She got a call inviting her for an interview. To help get Wendy ready, her career coach checked out her prospective job’s description and prepared some practice questions, giving her feedback on her responses. This meant she cruised through the interview process — even finding joy in it. “I was definitely feeling that I was doing a great job, and that I was prepared in the right way for that position,” she said. 

I was prepared for the questions, and I was able to answer with confidence, and that's how I got the job offer just after a week. Wendy Zambrano, TripleTen grad

Now, she’s a Quality Assurance Tester for Revenue Solutions Inc. And she’s clearly become an SQL master, because that’s the bulk of her job. “SQL — that's the skill that I'm using the most. I'm doing queries all the time to pull out data and I love it,” she said.

But the work isn’t the only thing she’s appreciating. Working for the call center, she didn’t get to know any of her colleagues. Now, she feels in touch with her team. “Even though it's remote, we can feel like we are connected. We are all the time trying to make a very good work environment, to make it fun,” she said. “It's an interaction I didn't have in the other job — I had to be just talking with the customers, not with my co-workers. And now I have a team, and we are supporting each other."

No longer does she need to choose between a personal and professional life. In her new career, everything is in harmony — she even gets to work beside her new, sleeping baby. “I'm fulfilling a lot of my personal goals in my life as a mother, as a woman, and also as a person who likes to work, who has career goals.”

See if a bootcamp’s right for you

Want to check if you should follow in Wendy’s footsteps? Take our quick quiz_{Is a Bootcamp Right For You?} to see if a bootcamp is your ticket to professional transformation.