Towards Understanding Barriers and Mitigation Strategies of Software Engineers with Non-traditional Educational and Occupational Backgrounds
For researchers and practitioners interested in broadening access to software engineering careers, this work offers a qualitative framework of barriers and strategies, though it is exploratory and incremental.
This paper identifies barriers faced by software engineers with non-traditional backgrounds and proposes mitigation strategies, using a grounded-theory analysis of Reddit data and a follow-up survey. The study provides a framework for understanding these challenges but does not report quantitative results.
The traditional path to a software engineering career usually involves a post-secondary diploma in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field. However, many individuals working as software engineers take a non-traditional path to their careers, starting from other industries or fields of study. This paper explores the barriers that individuals with non-traditional educational and occupational backgrounds face when pursuing a software engineering career and proposes potential strategies to overcome those barriers. A two-stage methodology was used, consisting of an exploratory study followed by a follow-up survey. The exploratory study consisted of a grounded-theory-based qualitative analysis of relevant Reddit data to yield a framework around the barriers and possible mitigation strategies. These findings were then supplemented through a follow-up survey. Understanding these barriers and what strategies could be effective is an important step towards making software engineering more accessible to individuals with non-traditional backgrounds. In addition to fostering functional diversity, this might also serve to tackle labor shortages within the software engineering industry.