From Healthcare to Deathcare: A Software Developer's Story

We all know there are 3 certainties in life - death, taxes and exam results.

What isn't a certainty is the career path you ultimately take. Today, there are more options than ever to explore different directions - if your first choice of course or career doesn’t work out, or if you discover new passions along the way - that’s okay!

In a new series, we look at what that's looked like for some of the very talented people whose path has led to PlotBox.

Shelagh Monaghan is a software developer in PlotBox’s Data Analytics, Insights, Visualisation team, having joined us after working for Deloitte as a software developer for 2 years. Prior to that she made a career change from nursing to tech after 15 years in the healthcare industry.

How did you get into nursing?

To be honest, at the time I had no clear direction with what I wanted to do. Back then my goal was to move to the city and have fun, which I think should be the goal when you’re young and have the energy, rather than the pressure of figuring out your entire life and what you want it to look like.

I’d actually dropped out of my A levels, because I wasn’t interested in school by that stage, and I just wanted to go work and save up for travelling and games consoles! I ended up getting a job in a local care home, and doing an access course in the evenings at Tech in case I one day decided I wanted to go to University.

As time went on I’d realised I really enjoyed helping people, and I’d seen the government was doing a scheme to get more nurses. Obviously my family were encouraging me into this as well because most of the women in our family were nurses at some point in their own careers and it seemed like the right choice at the right time.

What was it like?

It was fun, interesting, crazy, hard work. There were days I was going in thinking it was going to be a quiet shift and all hell broke loose. I think in a weird way those days were my favourite because it was always a new challenge and you’d end up seeing the best in people when everything hit the fan

Did you ever think you’d change career?

I never really considered leaving healthcare itself until I started learning more about IT. 

Although I’d considered studying IT back during my GCSEs briefly, in the early 2000s most of the IT jobs were either in England or as IT administrators in schools and businesses etc.

That kind of work just didn’t appeal to me, so it never seemed like an option until decades later when development really took off in Northern Ireland

What made you want to change?

I am a nerd at heart, I remember our family used to always have computers around and I used to always be putting parts together.

Sometime in 2015 I was playing around with coding python on a raspberry pi and looked up computer science certifications to get better at coding as a hobby. I started studying an IT certificate with Open University.

I ended up enjoying it so much I went on to just keep doing more and eventually decided to get a degree in it and began planning for a career change. By then there was a tech boom in Belfast and a bunch of companies were settling in Northern Ireland and our homegrown ones were on the rise, so it seemed like the perfect time.

I suppose part of that change was also because as I learned about tech, I realised just how much it can impact people’s lives and I started to get a glimpse of what good it can really do on a larger scale.

It made me realise I wanted to make a difference on a bigger scale. It’s why I have a soft spot for companies that make a difference in a positive way to people that need it.

PlotBox certainly does that - making life easier for deathcare professionals via software allows them more time to spend on care of the deceased and supporting their families

Can you imagine what it would be like if you never changed?

I actually can’t because they’re two different worlds.

If I made the choice to never change careers, part of me would probably always regret it, and that’s a partly why I did - I knew I could always go back to healthcare if I didn’t love it, but I do.

Some days I miss caring for people who need it, but I always have the nice memories

Would you like to be part of our amazing team? Check out our open jobs here.