Has my job trapped my career?

[Woden]

So right now I'm 33 and working as a control room operator for a large logistics company. I don't know what it is like in other firms, but here, its not a great environment. Everything is our fault, they break the machines (by running it outside of spec) its our fault, transport don't have enough drivers, our fault.

The good side, is I am basically a multiskilled tech ninja. I run SCADA (controls the machinery), assign work to the engineers and drivers, look after the shop floor IT hardware, and anything else no one wants to claim responsibility for.

Theres no movement though. My team is small (8 staff for 24/7 cover) and we don't have a supervisor or manager. We organise our own holidays and overtime, and only really interact with the engineering manager when we need things authorising. So I need a career change.

Ive recently been tasked with rebuilding and automating everything we do with Excel and I am in my element. It's a lot of VBA but I already had a basic knowledge of programming. Is VBA developer a thing? Can I get into something like that without qualifications?

 

[JonJ678]

VBA developer is certainly a job description and the software industry has a lot of wholly unqualified people in it.

The usual advice is to write some code, preferably for an existing project but failing that your own, and upload it to github. That then serves as sufficient evidence for most of the recruitment effort.

I got into professional software dev by applying for a role where I knew the problem domain well as I couldn't prove any particular competence at coding. The next role was developing in a domain I knew nothing about, so that one first role seems to be been sufficient to sidestep actually having, say, a computer science degree.

It's pretty good, provided you find methodically working through unreasonable puzzles to be satisfying instead of infuriating.