I’ve been running into this question more often: “What courses should I take if I’m learning IT from scratch?” Well, for example, if your first profession is teacher of Ukrainian language and literature, but you want to get a job as a Haskell programmer.
For me this is a very difficult question. First, I’ve never seen, right in front of me, someone with a completely different qualification become an IT person, and which courses they attend in the process. Second, answering “this will take you 4 years” (as it takes our students) is very hard when people expect quick solutions from you.
No courses in Kharkiv — full-time, correspondence, or online — will turn you into an IT person from scratch. An IT person is not about pressing buttons, and not about knowing a language’s syntax. Because no IT courses teach discrete mathematics. For retraining into IT from scratch, discrete mathematics should become the most in-demand course. Graph theory, set theory, Boolean algebra — there’s no doing IT without this.
Discrete mathematics is taught only at universities as part of bachelor’s training. And that lasts exactly four years.