I joined a company as a newbie software developer, and Bam! 20 years later am an Enterprise Architect!
To be precise,
I started my journey with a Bachelor’s in Electronics and Communications Engineering. At the time, IT jobs were lucrative, and hence I applied to a software consultancy company as a newly graduated student and got the job. The company provided me 3 months of training in mainframe technologies and placed me as a Mainframe developer.
Three years down the road, I saw that .Net technologies were all the rage, and I up-skilled myself to a C# developer. Then a few years down the road, I up-skilled to Java technologies, then moved to engineering Out-of-the-box eCommerce platforms. For the next couple of years, I played the role of a solution architect (Without actually the title, because that was not a thing back then. You were simply a senior member of technical staff). I later moved on to Engineering management roles continuing my role as a Solution architect alongside people management.
I was doing the same ol’ thing with software delivery, when I realized I loved being an Architect more than being in delivery / Engineering roles. When a role opened up in Enterprise Architecture team 5 years ago, I switched and never looked back since then.