9 Months. From Zero IT Experience. To Lead DevOps Engineer.
- Nana Janashia
- Dec 29, 2025
- 8 min read
How Isreal went from civil engineering in Nigeria, moving to UK working night shifts to landing two job offers and a high salary.
Watch Isreal's Complete Journey
See the full timeline, interview questions, and lessons learned from his transformation.
Meet Isreal 👋
Civil engineering graduate from Nigeria. Zero IT background. Visa running out. Working night shifts at retail jobs just to pay rent.
Nine months later: Lead DevOps Engineer with two job offers and a £60-70K salary.
This is Isreal's story.
And if you've been telling yourself "Next year is the year I finally take my career serious" — this is the roadmap you need to see. The inspiration you need to read.
The Starting Point: No Money, No Time, No IT Background
Isreal didn't have the luxury of taking months off to learn. He was doing his master's degree in the UK with a visa deadline hanging over his head.
After graduation, he had maybe 12-18 months to land a sponsored role, or he'd have to leave the country.
To make ends meet, he worked retail night shifts. Coming home at 2am, exhausted, barely making rent.
Most people in that situation would just try to find any job quickly. Isreal did the opposite.
He chose DevOps strategically.
Not because it was easy. Not because everyone was doing it.
But because DevOps salaries (£45,000-60,000 starting) automatically clear the UK visa sponsorship threshold of £38,700.
It solved two problems: the visa requirement and building a career in a globally-demanded field.
The Strategic Choice
Isreal understood something most people miss. Don't just learn random skills. Understand what problems those skills solve — both for you and for employers. DevOps wasn't a hobby. It was a calculated path to visa sponsorship and career stability.
The Year He Wasted (So You Don't Have To)
Isreal did what everyone does: tried everything.
Front-end development for a month. Nope.
Python for data science. Nope.
Azure certification. Led nowhere.
Then DevOps.
Bought a Udemy course: "DevOps from Beginner to Advanced." Watched all the videos. Followed the demos. Felt productive.
End result? Still couldn't build anything real.
Why?
Most courses teach tools in a vacuum.
Here's Docker. Here's Kubernetes. Here's Jenkins.
All separate. All disconnected.
Like learning to drive by studying the engine, the steering wheel, and the brakes — but never putting them together in an actual car.
In addition, they show you syntax. They show you basic examples. But they don't show you how everything connects in a real system.
"I couldn't factor in how different tools and technologies come together. I was getting interviews but failing them. I needed to do something different."
The problem wasn't effort. It was approach.
Scattered YouTube tutorials and random Udemy courses don't build the mental model you need.
They build a collection of isolated facts that don't connect when you need them to.
The £1,200 Bet When He Had Nothing
Finally, Isreal saw our DevOps Bootcamp. The curriculum matched exactly what job descriptions were asking for. Terraform. Kubernetes. CI/CD. Ansible. Monitoring.
Everything integrated, not isolated.
But there was one problem: it cost around £1,200. He was barely covering rent with retail shifts.
Most people quit here: "I can't afford this."
Isreal however did the math.
The Real Calculation
DevOps salaries start at £45,000-60,000 in UK. That's £3,750-5,000 per month.
The bootcamp cost was less than one month of his future salary.
If the investment got him the job 6 months faster, he wasn't losing £1,200 — he was gaining £22,500-30,000.
NOTE: The numbers are from 2022/23
He chose the installment payment option. £250 per month.
Tight, but doable.
And more importantly, it created accountability.
When your money is on the line every month, you don't skip days. You show up.
The 9-Month Timeline (after wasting one year): What He Actually Did
1 year: Scattered Learning Phase
Udemy courses, YouTube tutorials, trying different IT fields. Completed courses but couldn't build anything real. Got confused about how tools connect. No clear direction or roadmap.
Month 1: CKA Certification
First structured learning experience with our CKA course. Deep dive into Kubernetes fundamentals. Passed exam on first attempt. Started getting interviews but couldn't pass technical rounds. Still missing something.
Month 2-8: DevOps Bootcamp
Complete end-to-end projects. Built CI/CD pipelines that actually deployed to Kubernetes. Learned Terraform, Ansible, monitoring — all integrated. Understood troubleshooting. Built portfolio projects. Studied after 2am shifts.
Month 9: Job Offers & Career Launch
Recruiter messaged on LinkedIn. Two companies extended offers. Chose Lead DevOps role at £60K with modern tech stack (K8s, Terraform, Ansible) over £35K junior role with legacy tools.
The Interview Question That Separated Him
When Isreal got the interview for the Lead DevOps Engineer role, he wasn't confident.
He'd never worked as a DevOps engineer before. The title seemed way above his experience level.
But the interview wasn't about memorizing tool names. They asked problem-solving questions:
"Your CI/CD pipeline takes 10 minutes to run. Developers are frustrated. How do you optimize it?"
Watch what happened next.
Most candidates say "use caching." That's the surface answer. The memorized answer.
He explained:
How Docker image layers work (immutable, cached individually)
The strategy for optimization (place stable dependencies at the top, changing code at the bottom)
Why this works (Docker caches unchanged layers, only rebuilds what changed)
How to implement it (Docker build cache, CI/CD cache configuration, parallel jobs)
That's not memorization. That's understanding how the pieces work.
The interviewer nodded. Isreal got the job.
"The hiring manager told me later that most applicants had impressive CVs but couldn't answer conceptual questions. They could list tools but couldn't explain how to solve real problems."
Want to know the wildest part? They gave him this exact problem on his first day.
The interview wasn't hypothetical. It was testing if he could solve problems they actually had.
Two Offers, One Strategic Choice
Isreal didn't stop interviewing after getting one offer.
He had two processes running simultaneously:
Offer 1: Junior DevOps role at £35,000 using ECS and legacy tools
Offer 2: Lead DevOps role at £60,000 using Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible
NOTE: The salaries are from 2022
He chose the Lead role. Not just for the salary (though that's a 25% increase worth £125,000-175,000 more over 5 years).
But because the tech stack matched what he learned and would give him better long-term career options.
Technologies you work with define your next opportunities.
Legacy tools limit you. Modern, in-demand tools open doors everywhere.
Day One: He Built Production Clusters While Others Were Still Onboarding
First day anxiety? Absolutely.
Isreal had never worked as a DevOps engineer before. So of course he was.
But within weeks, he was building production Kubernetes clusters from scratch. Not tutorials. Not demos. Production systems handling real traffic.
How?
Our CKA course taught him Kubernetes the hard way. Not EKS where everything is abstracted and managed. Kubeadm. Building the control plane manually. Configuring networking from scratch. Understanding every component.
Most DevOps engineers learn EKS first. Click buttons, get a cluster. Easy.
But when something breaks? They're stuck. They don't know what's running under the hood.
Isreal's company needed bare-metal Kubernetes for compliance reasons. Government data restrictions. Couldn't use managed services.
🙌 First Year Results
Added value from week one. No long onboarding.
Saw a gap: security posture needed improvement
Enrolled in DevSecOps bootcamp while working full-time
Implemented security practices across pipelines and infrastructure
Performance review after 1 year: crushed it. Another 10% salary increase.
His mindset? Continuous learning. That's what keeps you thriving, not just surviving.
Isreal's Advice: 4 Things He Wishes He Knew Earlier
At the end of our conversation, I asked Isreal what practical advice he would give to someone in the same position he was in before landing his Lead Engineer role.
Here's what he shared in his own words:
1. Don't Chase Certifications First
"The first thing I would tell anybody is do not chase after certifications at the first time because chasing certifications most times just keeps people in a loop like watching tutorials. Most of the certifications we see are just like multiple choice questions like Terraform — you just need to click. Even the solution architect by AWS is just like multiple choice question. You need to click A and B.
I will advise them to go hands on, understanding what you are doing, not just choosing certifications. At the end of the day, certification is not going to get you past the door. It can be attractive, but I think in 2025, as it is currently in the market, your certification is more or less useless if you don't have the skills."
2. Get a Structured Path and Follow It Strictly
"You need to get a structured path for yourself. It is very easy for you to get distracted by just learning tools. Sometimes when you come on LinkedIn, you see people posting different kinds of tools. It is very easy for you to be overwhelmed if you don't have a structure path — something that you need to follow. Make sure you follow it strictly.
Get a roadmap, get a structured path, make sure you are following that."
3. Integrate Tools in Real Projects, Not Isolation
"You need to put whatever you are learning into practice. Instead of learning stuff in isolation, learning Terraform and all of that, even if you have just one project, and you are able to build that project using these tools like CI/CD pipeline, Terraform to provision infrastructures, Kubernetes to deploy your microservices — if you can integrate everything into a project, that gives you an idea on how it works practically in the real world.
In the real world, we're not doing anything in isolation. You can't be doing Ansible on its own. Definitely you'll be using Ansible with some kind of CI/CD. You can use Terraform with CI/CD, you can use Kubernetes with Helm, those kind of toolings. So don't learn anything in isolation. Make sure whatever you are learning, you are trying to integrate them together, use that to build projects."
4. Focus on Concepts, Not Just Tools
"Don't just focus on learning the tools because if I was too centric, if I was only focusing on the tool without understanding the concept and the problem they were trying to solve, that means I wouldn't have even landed my job because I had experience with Jenkins and not with GitLab.
But the fact that I understood what the concept was all about and the tool was just like a means to an end, just to achieve what I want to achieve. It's just like a mechanic who has different tools. And me, who is not a mechanic, if I have a spanner, that doesn't make me a mechanic, right?
It comes with the understanding — the concept, understanding what you are trying to solve and not just the toolings. That actually gave me confidence. Sometimes when I come online and see people posting about using different tools, I'm not bothered because all those are just tools. They're not the main concept. The main concept companies want to see is that you can build a robust CI/CD pipeline to cut down release time — not just learning without understanding what you are trying to solve."
Bonus: Find a Community or Mentor
"You need a community or even a mentor — a community where if you are faced with challenges, you can reach out to people, reach out to your community to get support. That was the thing I actually lacked when I bought that course on Udemy. Sometimes I needed to figure it out by myself.
Sometimes it's good for you to figure out things all by yourself, but sometimes it takes you much more time — it makes you go through a longer route. There's a trade-off. If you are learning on your own, it takes time, but then the knowledge tends to stick with you. But having a balance between trying to figure out things by yourself and also having somebody to contact when things go wrong — you can actually balance that up and it's also going to shorten your journey."
What Makes This Different from Other Success Stories
Isreal's story isn't a highlight reel. It's the real path — including the dead ends you need to avoid.
❌ The year he wasted on scattered courses that led nowhere.
❌ The interviews he failed before understanding what employers actually test for.
❌ The broken portfolio link that somehow didn't kill his chances.
❌ The anxiety of accepting a Lead role when he didn't feel ready.
You learn more from seeing where someone struggled than from seeing their success. Most success stories skip the mess. This one shows you the wrong turns so you don't make them.
Ready to Follow Isreal's Path?
Learn the same way Isreal did — with structured, integrated projects that prepare you for real DevOps roles, not just tutorial completion.
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