When Soria Sayer moved to Germany from Afghanistan in 2016, she left behind a well-established career in finance. In Afghanistan, she earned a Bachelor Degree in Educational Psychology and worked for the Ministry of Finance as an accountant and finance officer.
When she arrived in Germany she did not know what she should do for work. She was not fluent in German, and started taking classes. She did land a contract job as a buying assistant, but it only lasted for five months.
Soria took some finance courses while she was pregnant, but finance no longer felt like the right career for her. She was eager to get back to the professional world but soon realized that it was difficult to find childcare for her newborn son.
Soria’s husband suggested that she learn to code and transition into tech. Back when she was working in finance she felt stuck and despite being an educated woman, she didn’t feel like she had many options.. Working in tech appealed to her, and she soon fell in love with it.
She enrolled in Udacity’s React Nanodegree program and turned her life around. “After every course you have to do a project, and in that project you have to face a lot of challenges and problems. I learned that I can tackle these things alone. But I also learned when to reach out to my mentor,” she said.
Soria graduated from her Nanodegree program in March 2020. She then worked as a junior web developer at the same company as her husband. As of May 1, 2021, she now has a new job as a front end developer. Soria credits the skills she learned at Udacity for securing both her role as a junior web developer and her new job.
Watch her story here:
