From Healthcare Support Worker to Cloud & DevOps Engineer

I didn't start in tech. I started as a healthcare support worker, the kind of role where you learn what it actually means to work under pressure, communicate clearly with people who are stressed or unwell, and get things right the first time because there often isn't a second chance. Those aren't soft skills. They're the exact skills that made the move into IT possible for me later.

Deciding to change career isn't simple. It means starting again in some ways, learning a whole new set of technical skills while still needing to pay bills and keep a life running. I studied for a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and built my technical foundation from there, into IT support, then further into cloud and infrastructure work.

Today I work as a Cloud and DevOps Engineer, SC-cleared, with certifications across Microsoft Azure (Administrator Associate, Security Engineer, Virtual Desktop, and Fundamentals), HashiCorp Terraform, PRINCE2, and Fortinet security. None of that happened overnight, and none of it required starting from a computer science background. It required a genuine, structured path, one step at a time.

That's exactly why I founded SmoothOps 365. When I was making my own transition, I remember wishing there was a single, honest, structured path built specifically for people like me, healthcare workers and career changers, rather than generic IT courses built for people who'd already decided tech was their world. So I built it.

SmoothOps 365 is new. We don't have hundreds of graduate outcomes to point to yet, and I won't pretend otherwise. What I can offer instead is a genuine, first-hand understanding of exactly what this transition takes, because I've made it myself, and a course built around the real path, not a theoretical one.