Two and a half years ago, Meredith Hamilton, 58, went back to school. Her choice of subject was not one normally associated with baby boomers, though. She chose to take the User Experience (UX) Design Immersive program at General Assembly, an education company specializing in technology classes. UX design creates and enhances user satisfaction with a product using a variety of computer coding, design and analytical programs.
With a background in journalism and illustration, Hamilton had recently taken a short summer class in UX design at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, and was eager to study it more in depth and find a job in the growing field.
Hamilton, who now works as the UX lead for New York Cares, felt it would “open a whole future,” she says. “I’m not one of these people that’s that interested in retiring.”
It’s not just millennials who are studying coding and clickstreams. General Assembly’s senior regional director, Mickey Slevin, says that at any time, roughly 5 to 10 percent of their full-time students are over age 40, and he sees that number only increasing.
“We expect the number of older students to grow, as workers impacted by new technology seek to expand their skills and access to long-term career opportunities,” he says.
But while some things get easier with age, changing careers and learning new technical skills can be more challenging.
Hamilton admits that she was apprehensive about being older than her peers when she first started the program, but says that you can’t dwell on the number on your birth certificate.
“It’s not a salient, defining factor in somebody’s profile,” she says. “It shouldn’t be.”
She was able to push past her fears by focusing on applying skills she already had to her course work while learning new ones, quickly proving her mettle to younger classmates — and herself — on group projects. “I’m so glad I did [the program],” she says. “If you just operate from a position of fear, then you won’t change.”
Kevin Regan, 51, says generational differences aren’t as big as people are led to think. A longtime graphic designer focusing on print products, he was also worried about his age when he signed up for the UX design course at General Assembly last year, but says he needn’t have been.
“A lot of the age differences are a little bit exaggerated,” he says. “All these conversations about ‘millennials and this and that’ are mostly overblown. I don’t think Gen-Xers and millennials are all that different.”
Marie Sonko, 38, says it wasn’t her being older than her classmates that made things more challenging — it was having more responsibilities. After working for a decade as a flight attendant, she took time off to raise children. When she decided to reenter the workforce, she wanted to pursue her long-held passion for computer science, but being a mother to 3-year-old twins made things extra challenging. The immersive software engineering bootcamp she took at the Flatiron School last year required more than 100 hours of prep in advance of the program itself.
“It was like, coding, eating, sleeping. It was extremely challenging,” she says of the experience. “Other [younger] students had more time to prepare.”
But, surprisingly, she says, her past work as a flight attendant has proven helpful in her current job as a software engineer, which she landed after completing the 12-week bootcamp in August.
“No day was the same,” Sonko says of her high-flying former career. “Just as it is with what I’m doing now. It was almost like the job as a flight attendant was preparing me for being an engineer. Everyday when you get on the plane, you have to be prepared for anything to happen.”
Hamilton agrees and says she was able to take many of the skills she practiced as an illustrator and journalist and apply them to being a UX designer.
“It’s very similar,” she says. “You research, you write content, you think about content strategy. Can you deliver an experience to a big group of people? Can you operate within an organization?”
Hamilton says that changing to a technology career isn’t necessarily the big, 180-degree change people make it out to be.
“It was a pivot,” she says. “People think of tech as being its own world, but it’s not.”
Nonetheless, career experts caution that no one — no matter their age — should learn to code or take an intensive computer course if that’s not really what they want to be doing.
Maggie Mistal, an executive and career change coach, says anyone considering working in a new field should first think deeply about their strengths, talents, interests and motivations.
“If these point toward career possibilities in technology, only then take the next step,” she says.
Mistal also notes that going back to school isn’t always necessary, although it can often be helpful. Regan says he was able to learn some new technologies on his own, but he struggled to make the full transition into a new career without the course work at General Assembly and the career counseling.
“I would liken it to an apprenticeship,” he says of his experience with the program.
Sonko cautions that learning to code isn’t for everyone. “You have to make sure this is something you really want to do,” she says. “Just doing something because it’s a trend is not a good idea.”
For her, it was a true passion, and even though the program was tough and “there was a lot of crying,” she says it was worth it. She wants her young children to know that they can do anything with their lives.
“There were so many times where I thought about giving up,” she says, “but then I’d look at my daughters.”
