The Decision

After almost five years as a Shift Leader at Tesco, I left retail behind to go all in on a career in IT. On paper it probably looked like a strange time to walk away from a stable job for the uncertainty of starting over in a new field. Looking back, it’s the opposite — it’s the first decision in a long while that I’ve felt genuinely certain about.

It wasn’t a sudden change of heart. It’s something I’d been circling for years before I actually did it, and I want to use this first post to explain why.

A Passion That Started Young

I’ve been drawn to computers for as long as I can remember. Long before I had any language for it — “IT,” “sysadmin,” “networking” — I was the kid taking things apart to see how they worked, poking around in settings menus I probably shouldn’t have touched, and being the person friends and the communities I was part of would come to when something needed fixing. I’ve always been active in a lot of different online communities, and somewhere along the way I became the one keeping servers running, sorting out other people’s tech problems, and generally giving back with whatever I’d taught myself.

That early curiosity never really went away, it just didn’t have an obvious outlet for a long time. Retail paid the bills and gave me real, transferable experience in handling pressure, people, and problems on the fly — but it was never the thing I was actually passionate about. The thing I kept coming back to, on evenings and days off, was tech.

What I’d Already Been Building

By the time I actually left, “interested in computers” had turned into something more deliberate. I’d built a home lab running both Windows and Linux across VMs and LXC containers — not because a course told me to, but because I wanted to understand how systems actually behave: configuration, user management, what happens when something breaks, and how to recover it cleanly. I set up and managed a proper UniFi network at home, moving past “plug it in and hope” into actually understanding IP addressing, connectivity, and diagnosing faults when they came up.

I’d also started writing my own software — custom Discord bots in Node.js, working through event-driven logic and command handling, mostly by reading documentation and figuring things out through trial, error, and the occasional late night stuck on one bug. None of it was assigned to me. I did it because I wanted to, which in hindsight was a pretty clear sign of where my actual interests were.

At some point it stopped feeling like a hobby and started feeling like the thing I should have been doing with my career all along.

Why I Left When I Did

Retail gave me a lot: experience managing people under pressure, resolving problems in real time, dealing with escalations, and keeping things running when things went wrong — skills that, honestly, translate better into IT support and operations than people might expect. But leaving wasn’t only about career. Retail management is relentless in a way that’s hard to explain unless you’ve done it, and it had been taking more out of me than I was willing to admit for a long time.

So this hasn’t just been about retraining. Since leaving, I’ve been taking the time to properly look after my mental health, and to actually be present for my children in a way that shift work never really allowed. That’s not a detour from the career change — it’s been part of doing it properly. I didn’t want to walk straight out of one high-pressure job and into chasing a new career at the same unsustainable pace. Taking the time to get myself right first means I’m building this new direction on solid ground instead of on fumes.

Why the Open University

I chose to study a BSc (Hons) in Computing and IT with the Open University rather than a traditional full-time degree, and that was a deliberate decision, not a fallback.

Right now my priorities are looking after myself, being there for my children, and building toward this career change — some days in that order, and all at once on others. A campus degree with fixed lecture times was never going to fit around that. The Open University lets me study at my own pace, around my family and around whatever a given week actually looks like, without putting my degree or my kids on hold for each other. I wanted the theory (computing systems, operating systems, networking fundamentals, software development) to sit alongside the hands-on side I was already doing in the home lab, fitted around real life rather than instead of it. That flexibility mattered more to me than a campus ever could.

What This Blog Is For

I’m starting this blog partly to document that process honestly — the home lab experiments, the networking rabbit holes, the tools I end up using day to day, and the coursework as it happens — and partly to hold myself accountable to it. It won’t be purely technical, either; getting here has been about more than a career pivot, and that’s part of the record too. If you’re on a similar path, considering a career change into IT later than the “traditional” route, or figuring out how to rebuild toward something while looking after yourself and your family at the same time, this is going to be that record.

Onwards.