Sibu Khoza was 26 when she walked into our Johannesburg open day. She’d spent four years in a call centre, was good at her job, and was bored out of her mind.
Step one: pick the right programme, not the popular one
Sibu’s instinct was to enrol in our most-applied-to bootcamp — full-stack web development. We talked her out of it. The market for junior full-stack devs is saturated; the market for cloud and DevOps juniors is not.
“I almost didn’t take that advice. The job titles I’d seen on LinkedIn were all ‘developer’. Cloud engineer felt scary and abstract. But the salary data didn’t lie.”
— Sibu Khoza, Cloud Engineer at Quoin Fintech
Step two: treat the bootcamp like a job
She kept her call-centre shifts (evenings) and studied days. Every day. No skipping. She took the projects seriously, even the ones that felt like busywork.
Step three: ship a real thing
For her capstone, Sibu built an automated cost-monitoring dashboard for a small AWS account. Nothing flashy. It worked, it solved a real problem, and she could explain every line of Terraform she’d written.
What she’d tell you
One: pick the niche that has demand, not the one that has Instagram appeal. Two: assume the bootcamp is the easy part. Three: apply for jobs while you’re still studying.
She got hired in week 38.
