Ayaka Walked Out of Logistics Sales and Into Workday as Her First Engineering Employer

Ayaka joined SG Holdings fresh from university, spending four years in logistics consulting focused on warehouse operations design. Overseas work had been a long goal; she preferred earning the trip as a professional rather than a student-year abroad. Around year three or four, company-wide digitization pulled in tools like Kintone. In sales development she helped specify a sales-performance system with external SaaS engineers—APIs, data handoffs, requirement meetings. Rejected budget items pushed her team toward BI tools and light SQL from books. Technical interest rose; pairing skill-building with emigration became the plan. Engineering also fit a temperament that preferred deep focus over the sales ladder managers suggested.

Canada opened borders earlier in COVID. She arrived without engineering experience—admitting she played away unused prep time—and only began HTML/CSS in CICCC’s one-month preparatory stretch. School pace felt slow; she raced Udemy hands-on courses for about half a year, narrowing to React plus light database and API work until she could ship fullstack pieces. Roughly three portfolio apps forced debugging loops. Classmates with Japan engineering experience became de facto roadmaps she copied. She half-slept through morning lectures but submitted assignments; active paid learning beat passive classroom flow. She later wished she had joined Frog earlier for mentoring structure.

Job hunting began about two months before the academic term ended. An empty experience section hurt; volunteering helped little, so the day academics finished she started Japan contract work to put real bullets on paper while hunting about three months total. LinkedIn carried resume, portfolio, GitHub (daily commits growing the green graph), and a clear face photo. Workday became her first engineering employer; by interview time she had been there about two and a half years. The company sells B2B SaaS for money and workforce management, with Japan configuration support teams and a development-heavy Canadian site.

Day to day she rides a wide product surface—different frameworks per release, proprietary backends that force deep documentation reading, constant novelty. A move onto teams pushing an AI layer across Workday products excited her. Benefits surprised her: dental covered, contact lenses free, generous vacation and personal days, flexible hybrid often three office / two remote, flat first-name culture she calls strikingly “white” even by Canadian norms. She is not a ten-year planner; she wants to use a good environment and visa support while the AI wave arrives.