Community Power

It has been a month and a half since my education in Holberton School Medellín has finished, and with this comes a lot of challenges that were unthinkable back then, as everyone does after finishing the program, we are faced with a roller coaster of emotions, anxiety, excitement, fear, anger, joy, the "myth" of impostor syndrome starts to become a reality for some of us, I have to confess that I do not feel prepared sometimes, but let's be honest, who the $%#*^%)!is? the task of getting your first employment comes down to "experience" using a specific tool or language, this barrier that comes up on the first contact with a recruiter that barely knows what Javascript is and what it does, just to put an example, is frustrating, but I like to have a mind oriented to solutions.

The Solution

The lack of experience that cuts down your employment opportunity at the front door, could be solved by a very basic thing that we were taught to do at Holberton School during this pandemic.

• PL(Peer Learning): Programming is challenging, it's like "hitting the gym", its painful and sweaty and the next day you do not want to go, but your friend is waiting for you and you gave your word to that person, so you have a real commitment to go the next day NO MATTER what, same thing applies when it comes to working on a project with a peer, there is a commitment so you will be motivated and put aside your excuses. Before when I was at school there was this deadline pressure to fulfill projects, but when it's gone, you start slacking and procrastinating, it requires discipline to keep learning, and a peer is a great anchor to keep building your portfolio.
• PEERS: So you know you lack experience, maybe more knowledge as well, you need to demonstrate that you possess the knowledge to fulfill the role description, and the attitude of learning constantly, but you lack motivation because you have been rejected by employers and now you need to get back up and start building your portfolio, where do you get your strength to do so? get a peer!, but because school is gone and your peers have splitted apart, each one of them looking to build their career, where do you find this person that wants to learn the same topics that you do?
• COMMUNITY: It is incredible how this concept gets overlooked, or ignored, and I try to narrow down my own experience. Because of the pandemic that we are facing now, we use a lot of "virtual rooms" where we gathered and worked together on projects after reading loads of documentation, building a strong and tight relationship with all the participants of you cohort(mine was cohort 12), besides that we have a whatsapp group where we share random stuff without any type of filters, another for job openings, and the most recent is only meant for technology resources, I baptised that group as "Holberlab" and is in this group where I find a fast response to any technical challenge I am facing at the time, and at the same time, it allows me to find peers that are facing similar situations in our job hunting, which gives me the sense of "I am not the only one", inside this group is where I think that we should rely on each other, its is easier to find common interests, let it be back-end, front-end, devops, or mobile development, programming languages and libraries, and start working together again in virtual rooms to build a better portfolio.
• OPPORTUNITIES: If one member of the community lands a position on a desired role, their knowledge of other peers will lead them to recommend them for any open position where they work at, saving HR plenty of time because they know which of their peers is more likely to be a perfect match, even if the "experience" is not what HR was looking for, they have seen first hand that the job could be done by this person.