From Bank PMI and Fintech Finance to Health-Tech Full-Stack

Ishi’s Canada chapter opens with a finance résumé most career-changers would envy—and a dissatisfaction that résumé could not fix. Roughly ten years in banking began with corporate lending sales, then five years abroad on PMI work when his bank acquired an overseas institution in a Thailand and Indonesia context. Living among people who moved with more personal agency left him hungry to feel that freedom again. Back in Japan, large-company rhythms grated; he joined UPSIDER as finance manager in a CFO-less setup, raising mainly debt as the corporate-card business scaled. Watching engineers push the product—and feeling himself only the messenger of its charm—he decided he wanted to build. A liberal-arts background made hard skills feel missing; a new child made flexible, autonomy-respecting work feel non-negotiable.

Canada looked uniquely open to immigration as COVID eased. A one-month Victoria language stay fifteen years earlier had left a warm impression; Vancouver’s Asian communities lowered the parenting bar for non-native families; Frog’s engineer network sealed the city choice. He arrived alone in September 2023 to set up life; his partner and children (then two and four) joined in November. Langara’s WMDD beat BCIT or UBC on time and money after conversations with Frog mentors Tomo, Hiroshi, and later Koichi. An early inquiry email had floated BCIT and even an MBA; product-building skills won.

Startup busyness left him little Japan prep beyond tutorials. At Langara—about one year and four months—he reverse-engineered readiness: if term three typically yields work-ready level, he would hit that by term two’s end—Udemy ahead of class, playtime cut to family-or-study, selective effort on courses mentors flagged as low value. He ran all three major projects with the same novice-only team so ownership would not dissolve into easy tickets under seniors. That scratch-building habit, he says, now lets him take junior features from requirements through data models.

In the final four months he stacked Canadian proof: part-time work at Langara after instructors noticed his projects, plus a Frog board volunteer MVP—a B2B RFP matching tool—where he handled front-end-leaning implementation. Langara’s agile, Jira, and GitHub habits made the part-time jump feel continuous; the volunteer project was the opposite—define benchmarks and pipelines from nothing.

Job search stayed small, about three or four companies, but experience changed how interviewers spoke to him. Offer came late February; he started early March at a Canadian health-tech firm as a full-stack engineer—about two months in when interviewed, joking he might already be fired by publication. Attributes mark roughly eighteen months from path start to offer.

The through-line is not finance prestige converted overseas; it is a mid-thirties father choosing maker freedom, then executing a ruthless study plan until employers could treat him as already inside the profession.

Native-speed English in class still challenged him even when coursework itself was manageable among strong non-native peers. That friction did not stop the plan; it simply joined the list of costs a mid-thirties family move exacts while someone rebuilds into full-stack work from finance.