Got Sucked Into RPA, Trying to Get Out Reasonably Soon, but to Where?

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Hey guys apologies for the length, but I want to be as descriptive as possible,

I am wanting to get into a different “field” if you will, within software engineering as I feel that this RPA train isn’t going to last forever and don’t want to not have anything to fall back on.

To give some background I have a CS degree from normal big U.S. state school, I started in support for an RPA (robotic process automation) company and did that for little over two years.

After I was getting tired of support and companies started hiring RPA developers like crazy I got into an RPA dev role and have been doing this for 3 years now. Now while part of RPA development isn’t really writing code, it’s based on C# and object oriented concepts are still all there. I am also able to write C# component dlls and import them into the RPA projects and use the functions I write there just like I would with any C# project.

I do work for a “BigN” consulting tech company and while we have other projects and roles that aren’t RPA, I am pretty much the last standing RPA developer that they still rely heavily on. To give some context, I have been on a project for about a year and half now. Started out with a lead developer over me and another developer same level as me. Due to burnout from the lead and inappropriate behavior from the other one, 3 months into the project I am now technically the lead and have to do this project myself and with one other dev underneath me. We are on the tail end of the project now and were able to deliver everything just fine, but I just don’t know what is ahead here as there isn’t really anyone else to take up these RPA roles.

I guess my real question/concern is what can I be working on to make myself more marketable when I am ready to jump ship this year or next(if things don’t change)? I hear “cloud” and AWS/Azure being thrown around a lot, but I honestly do not even know where to start with some of these things. I guess I also just don’t really know how to necessarily work with a big team/large project. As it’s always just been me and like one other dev.

I also signed up to be a TA and help teach a data analytics/visualization boot camp at a local university which does things like Pandas/Numpy/D3 js etc. to try and help get me more rounded. I also did a side project recently to try and learn JS better with Mapbox, which I enjoyed too. Just when I look at some of these job descriptions, it always seems for stuff that I still haven’t worked with.

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issue solved!

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thjankyou!

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