Gaining a Caltech Certification to Augment Self-Taught Coding Skills 

As documented by Rogelio Lotho

I am an IT professional with over two decades of experience. I am currently living in New Mexico and for the past four years, I have been working at Los Alamos National Laboratory under the Department of Energy as a software developer. My duties include software maintenance in PHP, Node.js, Mern and .net. I also maintain various applications, which includes app and web development and upgradation. 

I am a self-taught developer, and I realized that I was lacking a solid foundation in software development, so I decided to take a course. 

My work revolves around handling various applications. Currently, I am handling five different applications in .NET, PHP, and other programming languages. With very little knowledge about new and emerging technologies, I was facing significant challenges at work. But now I have seen a difference in myself; I am able to perform these tasks better and more efficiently. 

I am confident that completing the course will help me get recognized at my company. 

Professional Journey

I am an IT professional with over two decades of experience in the field. I am originally from the Philippines, graduated from a school in the Philippines, and I have lived and worked in various countries.

I relocated to Australia during the initial days of my career. After that, I moved to Europe and worked in Germany for some time. I got a job in Zurich, Switzerland as a Micro Strategist in 1999. 

I moved to the United States a year later in 2000 and started working small jobs in the IT sector. I started working with Pepperdine University as a web and multimedia developer in 2005. In 2014, I earned a Masters in Business Administration from the same university. I worked there until 2015.

I started working with Wells Fargo in 2017 as a .NET developer and as a Senior Associate Analytics Developer in 2018 where I developed an API controller for a customer survey system. 

The Decision to Upskill

My background in software development is mostly self-taught; I don’t really have a solid foundation. Before I enrolled in the course, I had very little knowledge about Angular, Java, Full Stack, and Cloud. I really wanted to enhance my knowledge and I thought a course might be helpful. 

I chose Simplilearn because my company requires me to attend a course from a U.S.-recognized university, otherwise they won’t consider it during internal interviews, and Caltech CTME is a well-known university. My company approved the course and that is when I enrolled in the Simplilearn program. 

Another reason I chose this particular course was the excellent curriculum. All the technologies that I wanted to learn were being covered, which helped me choose this course.