The LinkedIn Message Tomohiro Almost Ignored

Tomohiro spent about seven years as a municipal civil servant in reception and resident-facing support. Motivation was helping people; once he had mastered the role, he wanted larger social impact. Exposure to industry–academia–government projects and people with international experience pushed him toward overseas growth. No prior programming job is stated—attributes mark a pure career change into engineering.

He chose Vancouver for immigration openness; Australia looked harder on visas. He preferred Langara over BCIT for more intake terms and lower tuition, prioritizing the post-graduation work permit. Self-study via Udemy, then documentation, included self-driven AWS project work. From about term three he aimed at full-stack roles rather than narrowing too early. COVID still shaped campus life: three of four terms online, limited chances to stretch English beyond project teammates.

Job hunting started around mid-May after an April 2021 graduation—slightly slower than peers. He applied to roughly fifty companies and interviewed at only two or three, a hit rate near five percent. Early on he mostly ignored LinkedIn scouts that felt random. After applications passed about forty, urgency changed his habits: he began answering those messages carefully. One polite reply turned into an interview—and into Tellext, a security-robot company that hired him as a Full Stack Developer. He stresses he did not apply to that company first; the company found him through the channel he had been discarding.

The offer arrived mid-July; he started part-time, then full-time from early August. Startup pace made the early months hardest. Participating later in hiring, he notes school brand is rarely a criterion. A 2023 addendum records two further successful job changes afterward, which he wrote about on Note. Attributes do not state months-to-offer; the search itself was about two months on the timeline he describes.

For career changers, the lesson is almost embarrassingly practical: volume matters, but so does treating every inbound thread as a possible door—especially the ones that look like noise until one of them is not.

Helping residents at a municipal counter and helping ship security-robot software sound unrelated until you hear his through-line: impact at a larger scale. Langara’s lower tuition and flexible intakes were tools for that scale, not status symbols. The Note follow-up about two later job changes suggests Tellext was a first Canadian chapter, not the entire book.

Full-stack targeting from term three was intentional scarcity management: one story for employers instead of a scatter of half-skills. Roughly fifty applications and a five-percent interview rate would have ended differently if the LinkedIn habit had not changed. Tellext’s security-robot domain gave a career-changing civil servant a product with physical presence—robots in the world, not only tickets in a backlog.