Upon graduation from the university, the most dreaded thought that comes to mind as a Nigerian graduate is how to be chosen from the pool of unemployed youths, how to scale through the jobless phase, land a dream job, and shame poverty.
Employment is pretty much more attainable for the upper class, but for the middle and the lower class, they tend to strive to make ends meet. This leads most graduates to either large or small scale businesses or taking up a different career such as teaching.
These, amongst others, were my thoughts as well. I was concerned and worried about what to do after the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC). Afterwards, I stumbled upon 35 Inspiring Quotes About Learning
Ben Nesvig emphasises the importance of learning a skill. I had a deep thought about making a change, breaking the stereotypes, being a different me and moving as the world revolves.
These thoughts brought me to learn a digital skill. So I moved from boot camp to Bootcamp looking for a suitable one that would make me who I wanted to be. Eventually, I stumbled upon Little Drop Coding e-boot camp. Voila, I began my journey into web development. I took courses in the freeCodeCamp responsive web design, the first course in the bootcamp's curriculum.
I thought everything would be as easy as HTML and CSS until I met Javascript. Javascript was challenging for me; it was a real task understanding loops, differentiating between arrays and objects, among others. I read so many lines of codes, watched so many videos on Amigoscode, and the rest was history. Then I proceeded to the front end development libraries where I learnt react.js, data visualisation, where I learnt d3.js and lastly, Back end and APIs that gave me an idea of how the web works.
I learned git and GitHub, and I could deploy my codes and projects to my GitHub account. However, I am still learning as I'm presently on the second phase of mobile web specialist at GADS.
Afterwards, I got an intern role at the Bootcamp, which made me thirsty for developing soft skills to perform well in my position. So, I took the Jobberman soft skills training, Collaborative working in a remote team by future learn and effective collaboration course by skillshare. I performed excellently well and bagged certificates from the courses. Then I earned a promotion to the Programme Administrator position; my duties included: coordinating all the processes involved in the rollout of admission forms, collecting and collating applicants' details, admitting and onboarding new students in the Bootcamp.
Also, I engage in regular report and newsletter writing, both graphically and in words using software tools like Word, Excel, Google Docs, Google Form, and Google Sheet.
I write blog posts regularly on Bootcamp's WordPress site; I also publish technology-related inspirational articles; All these I do remotely.
I aim at becoming a self-taught remote web developer, and I feel I'm treading the path. I'm optimistic that I'll soon land a software development role at a high tech software development company.
Even though I am not yet at the peak, I believe in starting from somewhere and being dedicated to it. If my story inspires you, take that big decision today!
By Aminat O. Fagbenle