Making the Jump from Support to Development

Tired of being stuck in support but itching to code? I feel you. Making the jump from support to development can seem tough, but it's so doable!

Here's the deal - with some planning and persistence, you can totally leverage your skills into a dev role. I'll walk you through the what and how step-by-step, so lace up those coding boots!

With your product support experience, you've probably built up valuable technical skills that can be leveraged to transition into a development role. It may seem daunting, but you can make the jump (with planning and perseverance.)

In this post, I'll share tips on going from support to development using project management tools like monday dev, because your experience doesn’t define your potential.

How Can You Make the Jump From Support to Development?

Moving from the support team may not always be as easy as some say, but you can do it in the 7 steps, which I’ve outlined below. Follow each of them, tick them off one by one, and you'll be so much closer to getting that ideal role (and pay bump) that you want and have been dreaming about.

1. Showcase Your Technical Skills:

First, thoroughly evaluate all the technical competencies you've developed as a support agent. Examples include:

• Troubleshooting issues
• Writing scripts to improve workflows
• Learning the product's architecture and systems

Emphasize how this translates into strengths like logic, debugging, learning ability, and customer insight - all highly valuable for developers.

2. Fill Skill Gaps:

Next, identify any skill gaps to fill through online courses, tutorials, or training programs. Focus on:

• Programming languages
• CS (computer science) basics
• Source control
• Testing, etc.

monday.com's training center offers free video tutorials to level up your project management abilities as well. 100% make use of all the free (or affordable) resources you can – there are many that are highly respected in the programming and development world, so you don't need a degree in computer science.

3. Manage Development Workflows:

To demonstrate your ability to manage development processes, I recommend that you use monday dev to track:

• Tasks
• Issues
• Code commits
• Pull requests
• Sprints
• Releases

Why monday dev? Because it's a tool I use, and it's specifically designed for product development teams. It's not a generalist tool like Notion or ClickUp. It's built specifically for product dev teams and has all the tools and integrations you need for Agile ceremonies, creating workflow automations using monday AI, tracking bugs, and more. If you can show you can use something like this, it's really going to set you apart and show that you know your stuff when it comes specifically to product development.

Not to mention, the software development templates allow you to implement Agile methodologies easily.

I suggest you take this short course on building workflows to get the basics on putting this all together into a professional workflow management process. It's going to show that you’re a real self-starter and the team leads on the development side aren’t going to need to hold your hand through anything, ever, at all.

4. Build Your Portfolio:

In your spare time, work on coding projects to showcase your skills. You can also produce data on your velocity, throughput, and project timelines as evidence of your skills.

Understanding velocity is kind of like semi-advanced stuff, so it will help you stand out if you can track this and really understand it and can show metrics like predictability (and know why they are important.)

If you want to go the extra mile, you can contribute to open-source and publish articles on sites like Medium using your projects and insights. It's a great way to test your skills on real projects, show real results, and then obviously communicate them to the wider world (which is the main thing because a skill that you don't talk about has a fraction of the value of a skill that you write about and publish content about.)

5. Pursue Internal Opportunities:

Discuss transferring internally with your manager. Highlight your product knowledge and passion for coding and see if rotational programs exist to get hands-on experience.

6. Leverage Your Background:

Let your superiors know how your background qualifies you for this move to development. Emphasize how your support skills make you a uniquely qualified developer.

You can reference skills like:

• Communicating technical details
• Customer empathy
• Replicating issues
• Product knowledge

Proving your value to ensure your stakeholders understand where and how you deliver value is only going to happen by communicating it to them. Don't let a single skill or unique perspective go to waste.

7. Interview Confidently:

Whether you interview internally or externally, clearly convey your experiences into a compelling narrative of being ready to hit the ground running in development. Plan and prepare for questions and answers that allow you to showcase your knowledge and skills.

The Transition from Support to Development

Transitioning from a support role to a development role is achievable with the right strategy (and a little help from the right online tools).

With planning, persistence, and leveraging your transferable skills, you can move from a support to a development role.

Evaluate your skills, fill gaps, build credentials, and interview confidently. Before you know it, you'll be in your desired development role.

Let me know if you have any other questions about changing your role or want more info on any of the steps mentioned above.

I’d be happy to discuss workplace transitions with you in further detail! I’ll be checking in on the comments.