S&E Guarantee Pilot: Victoria Marmili

“I had learned some really simple coding in school and loved it, but when it came to choosing a career path, no other girls chose IT. So, if I wanted to study IT, I needed to accept that I wouldn’t have any of my friends with me, and at that age, it was more important to have my girlfriends around me. So I ended up studying business administration. I enjoyed the maths, the statistics, the algebra, but I’ve always had this urge to go back to code,” she explains.

Victoria recently followed her husband, who moved to Spain with his job, and took the opportunity to take a course in front-end developing. “I could have got a job in a shop or a restaurant, but instead I used the time to study and build on what I had learned. COVID also played a role. With all the restrictions, I had time to stop, think, change.”

Three days before finishing the course, Victoria got a job in a consultancy firm, and she has since moved on, now working with Twenix. “There’s huge demand for these skills and COVID really stressed the importance of the digital sphere, the web, the cloud for sales and business continuity.”

Working in the field of technology, however, means that the learning never really ends. As technology advances, you always need to be learning about new programmes, new software, new ways of doing things.

To finance these studies, Victoria turned to Student Finance, where she got financial support in the form of an ISA (income-sharing agreement) backed by the EIF under the EU’s Investment Plan for Europe. “Without this, I wouldn’t have been able to do it, quite honestly,” she says. “I wouldn’t have taken this risk otherwise and there really wasn’t any alternative. Nobody else would have financed this kind of thing.”