Creating the Future You Want with Kenrick Tan

Quick-fire Questions with Kenrick

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Nearing the end of the Bootcamp course, and with the encouragement of Kai, Kenrick realised he was ready to explore a career in the industry — a eureka moment he tells us was the highlight of his journey with Rocket. Today, he is a proud cloud engineer with Versent. We catch up with Kenrick to find out more about his journey.

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Kenrick, you previously worked as a strategic consultant. Why did you decide to switch careers? 

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I saw the importance of tech when I was working as a strategic consultant for start-ups. In start-ups, it is common to take on double or even triple roles. I managed the tech team and the product, becoming the bridge between the tech team and management. I began to see the gaps between people with a tech background and those who didn’t have that, namely in business considerations, which resulted in differing timelines. As such, I saw the ever-growing need to at least know how to read code.

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What drew you to enrol at Rocket?

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The fact that it was six months and an online model. My brother is also a software engineer — he went through a different bootcamp, which he said was too short. When I showed the course outline to my CS graduate friends, they told me that it was well-structured and more than enough to get me started on my software engineering journey. Additionally, the instructors are highly qualified — not just academically, but also in their passion for giving back to the community.

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There were times at Rocket when I wanted to quit and thought I was wasting my time, but when I was putting together my portfolio, I realised that I had come a long way. I shared how I might not want to be a software engineer with my batchmates and instructors, but Kai always told me to keep going and see how it goes. I am glad I did not give up and completed the course because I love where I am now!

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How did Rocket help you prepare for a position in the industry?

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The role I am in now is an entirely different field from what we learnt in Rocket — I’m in the cloud engineering field and not writing code for application development. However, the skills and knowledge of web-app development are transferable to any other field, and not just limited to software engineering. Rocket gave me the starting blocks for any tech position — from asking the right questions to learning how to research code structure. I was also exposed to different technologies and context switching at Rocket, takeaways which I believe will follow me throughout my career.

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My goal is to live and work in 20 cities! Becoming a software engineer would help me pursue this dream simply because the need for software engineers is a skill demanded globally, especially in the field that I am in. Every week I get at least one recruiter adding me on LinkedIn and asking me if I’m interested in switching jobs. But hey, it’s only been two months, and I love my company, which Rocket introduced to me!  

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Final question! What advice do you have for prospective career switches wanting to join the industry?

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Dive right in! There’s no better time than now to try out software engineering. 

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Technology is the future; you can either be part of it or watch others move forward. I believe that everyone should at least understand how basic code works. I often describe learning programming languages or coding as learning a new language — the hardest part is getting started, but once you get the basics down, you will realise that it’s not that difficult. With Rocket Academy, I believe that you are making the right choice, just like I did.