A friend reached out to me recently and asked for advice on making a career tran
By deni-petrova · September 18, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
A friend reached out to me recently and asked for advice on making a career transition.
She wanted to move into something new, but still make use of the experience she had already built.
Conversations like this always make me think about my own squiggly career and how sometimes things fall into place without us expecting them to.
I studied Engineering and my first job after uni was as a software developer. Funnily enough, I was building reporting dashboards for the retail industry.
The irony. 😄
Then I moved to the UK and continued in software, this time as a web developer in a tech startup.
At some point I realised that writing code wasn’t my dream. As I used to say:
“I like speaking to people more than computers.”
The irony again, if you think about where we are today with AI! 😄
So I started thinking about my strengths. What was I good at?
That led me into customer support and renewals, then tech sales.
And somehow all of that eventually led me to ecommerce, then media, and ultimately to where I am today.
What I realised looking back is that none of those transitions ever felt like I was completely starting again.
There was always something transferable that I could use as the foundation, then build new knowledge around it.
And I think that’s also why I love what I do today. Commerce sits at the intersection of so many of the things I’ve picked up along the way: technology, people, business, data, media and understanding how all of those things come together to drive growth.
So the advice I gave my friend was to not think about a career transition as throwing away what she's already built. But think about which parts of her experience can create value in her next role from day one, and then build around that.
A squiggly career can sometimes give you a much more interesting combination of skills than a perfectly linear one.
And with AI changing so much about how marketing and commerce work, I’m starting to appreciate my own slightly strange combination more than ever.
And this is a picture of me, 15 years ago, trying to convince a room full of engineers that I know how to program a robot 😂 Very different from the type of presentations I do now!