An Inspirational Story of Determination and Recovery

It’s important to understand when a colleague may be going through a turbulent journey with mental health, which is why Pete spoke out about his experience and how his self-taught approach to becoming a developer helped him through some testing times. 

Fuelled by his determination for success and recovery, Pete adopted a proactive attitude to shift his focus within departments from Meet and Greet to our tech teams at MAG-O. He made the bold decision to share his experiences with us in the hope of helping others in the same position.

How did your journey with MAGO begin?

I started my career with MAG back in 2016 in the Meet & Greet team at Manchester Airport. I knew I wanted to get into development, and I was already developing my skills in app and web development through online courses. It was around that time that, whilst browsing YouTube, that I found out there were plans to open a new department at MAG – MAG-O. I saw it as a brilliant opportunity to get some development advice or experience from what looked like an exciting, new arm of MAG. I decided to approach the presenter of the video via LinkedIn, HR Director Kelly Singleton, and amazingly, she invited me to visit the offices. That was the beginning of the journey. 

Following a meeting with Nolan and Marcus, I started meeting fortnightly with Dan Glenn, who mentored my development progress until we managed to secure a five-month secondment with MAGO starting in November ‘18. 

It’s now been 20 months since I watched that video and I regularly think that if I hadn’t contacted Kelly all that time ago, then none of this would have happened, so I’m really thankful that she and the others at MAG-O were so encouraging and willing to help me get a foot in the door. 

What was your driving force to make this change?

I’ve been battling with clinical depression and anxiety my entire adult life.  I’ve been in and out of therapy and on and off medication for almost twenty years, and I found that having a long-term life or career goal just wasn’t a helpful option; the illness prevented me from thinking about my future within any kind of positive light, so a plan to ‘become’ a developer might as well have been a plan to go to the moon.

So, during a period of quiet, illness-wise, I decided to take baby steps towards doing things I enjoyed.  Not with the goal of seeing how far I could walk, but with a focus on taking the step itself and learning to do it for its own sake.  

At first it was piano or combining my past artistic skills with an interest in technology to learn digital painting and design. Then, I turned to coding mobile applications and websites.  I was reading blog posts, searching for coding help on StackOverflow and watching YouTube tutorials by professional developers, and eventually I found myself thinking that it’d be amazing to take what I’d learned and do it for a living. That leap again seemed insurmountable, but when l looked back on the progress I had already made, from hitting that first note on the piano to playing a full piece, or from writing my first html element to finishing my own metronome app for iPhone, I became confident that I could do it, I just needed a little help. 

Then I stumbled upon that MAGO introduction online.

I’m now happy to say that I haven’t experienced any symptoms of depression for over six months which, partly, I attribute to my new career at MAG-O and seeing my skills develop.

How do you see your career progressing with MAG-O?

There are some exciting projects coming up at MAG-O friendly team who work together to produce something new, and being able to point at a part of the site that’s going to be seen by thousands of people daily and say ‘We did that’ is an amazing feeling and one that I don’t think will ever get old. 

What an inspiration. Thanks for sharing, Pete!