Given a job with work that I lack the experience for (Develope/CI/CD)

[zoochadookdook]

Hi all. I work for a consulting company. I'm 29 (30 this month) and this is where I've spent the last 3 years. Prior to this I built SOW agreements for IT integration sales and prior to that ran a direct sales based off craigslist llc to pay my way through college and my house (literally go find certain things/flip them). Prior to that I was in the military. My degree is technically MIS and statistics - which is relational databases but nothing in terms of deep development. When I came on - I worked as a project coordinator - mostly in the financial areas for a big data migration project. I was eventually moved to the production support team and supported things like data QC checks and alerts. We lost that client and they benched me for months whilst I supported a few roles such as doing some technical manuals/similar.

Just recently (a month) - we merged with a smaller company and I have been assigned to their team/have a new group I report to. My manager is super nice and has mentioned that anything I want to learn I can - but I think I lack the basic knowledge for this sort of role in general.  We are all working on a  internal project/tool that's pretty freaking awesome (goal is sell in 6 months)- BUT the problem is I've been assigned work/scope that is nowhere near what I have experience in. It's automation/development work and whilst I've managed to do some of the UI/scripts and such like that when asked - I have been looking at my most recent work stories with no idea where to go from there.
This is an internal effort - and I am not billable to another client (with our structure we want to be billable - but if we aren't this is a good internal effort to be on). I do not want to hold up this work effort based on my lack of knowledge/skills - but the training I was told to get into this roll (Google cloud practicioner exam) is not ANYTHING related to the knowledge and understanding professional devs have.  I am embarrassed as I've spent weeks/nights taking vuetify course/python/javascript/gitlab/etc and I'm still nowhere when it comes to the understanding and working through of these in terms of our development. I don't know how to best approach this situation as I want to work and be involved anywhere when possible - but I need more technical training to be productive in this particular role. I have been told by upper management they will help me get to where I want to be career wise - and whilst I have maintained the same pay for the last 3 years - I feel like I've had yet to have a mentor/a path for personal technical/skilled growth.

I feel embarrassed that I've bounced around so much inside this for the past 3 years without a clear sense of direction whilst being given multiple roles in scopes of short time spans. I guess I was hoping I'd have SOME kind of technical or want to work in knowledge by now and just no dice :/

Any advice at all? I love business and running my own I made more/had less hours than I have here. I started this career in order to build skills/a base of a career so that if I do pursue self employment I can always support it/fall back on a career. I am thinking of asking if internally anything around project/operations management/supply chain is available because I love to be challenged/constantly seeing efforts of me work pay off and those seem like they'd be ingrained well in that space - but I'm posting here hoping someone has any advice.

[neo von retorch]

High level advice is...

Start at a high level.

You said your tasks are "automation" and "development."

At the highest level, automation is taking a task that someone or some team is able to do by hand, determining the repeatable parts of it, and figuring out how to tell a computer to do it. Where does the data come from, how does it get fed to the computer, what does the computer do with it, what comes out.

Any kind of development is going to include where the program(s) will live, where the data will live, and how data comes in and goes out.

What resources are available to you for storing programs and data? If you don't have them, who can provide them to you? How do you request them?

I will say it's intimidating to be in an architect or CTO role, and maybe you're too close to those roles for your experience level. It takes some experience to have confidence in the decision-making role. (What technology should I use? What infrastructure should I use? How much time and effort has to go into making sure things don't break later - source code control, tests, test data/test environments, etc.?) If you're being faced with these questions, is there anyone you can go to that might already have an idea about what the potential solutions will include?

Almost everything can be broken down, and each individual piece can likely be overcome with a technical solution (along with the necessary business knowledge.) But taking it all as a whole is likely overwhelming, and each piece will take time to learn and understand properly. Maybe you were put in a place where you are not set up to succeed. Figure out if you can work around that, or need to find a better fit.