Growth Mindset

In order to grow in your professional career, you need to adopt the growth mindset. You must be able to view challenges as opportunities to be better… not as obstacles. You need to also be willing to leverage the resources you have around you to learn and do what it takes to accomplish a task or a goal.

A Recent Learning Experience

Recently, I have been on a career path that has led me to try my luck with Andela, a technology company that is building engineering teams with top software developers in Africa. It all started with my application for the Andela Kigali Bootcamp…

Before beginning this journey with Andela, I was writing software programs and applications using programming languages like PHP, Java, and web technologies (HTML, CSS and a little JavaScript). These languages were able to help me build good-enough software products for different clients while I was freelancing. I had become comfortable with this tech stack and I wasn’t really trying to learn anything new… because I felt that I already had enough knowledge to build a product.

When I started to go deeper into the interview process for Andela, I saw that I was required to push my boundaries and learn new technologies and skills that I would need in order to proceed to further stages of the interviews. The thing that really worried me was that the required technologies were JavaScript and Node, in particular. Before Andela, I had always believed that JavaScript did not belong on the server and traditional server technologies like PHP were all that I needed. After understanding the requirements and passing different stages of the interviews, I realised that I was going to have to change my mindset about learning these technologies that I was worried about.

So I started reading tutorials, watching YouTube videos and doing everything I could to get to a level where I could be comfortable with JavaScript as a language, and Node as a server platform. It has not been an easy journey, but I’m glad I made the commitment to learn something new and add to my skills and knowledge. And really, I have to thank Andela for getting me out of my comfort zone.

At the moment, I’ve been accepted into the Kigali Bootcamp, and I look forward to using my recently improved growth mindset to learn as much as I can, and to pick up new skills with my colleagues and our facilitators… because I realise that with every challenge comes an opportunity to grow and be better.