| Tags | skill/starting_umuzi_basics |
Imagine you decide you want to build a house. So you hire a builder to help you out. You discover that the builder doesn’t know what a brick is. So you fire the dude.
Imagine hiring a carpenter who can’t identify the business end of a screwdriver.
For every profession, certain skills are fundamental. People who don’t have these skills just get fired. And people who do have these skills can go on to do great things.
There are certain foundational skills that you are going to need if you want to launch a career. If you cannot obtain ninja-level mastery of these skills then you just won’t get very far.
This sounds pretty scary. But we aren’t saying this to scare you. We just really want you to take this stuff seriously.
If you are taking one of our courses then we would not have let you in if we didn’t think you were capable of pulling this off.
We assess your understanding so we can help you understand. If we know where you are confused then we can help you more efficiently.
Our goal is to set you up for career success!
You’ll see some cards on your board that are all about specific skill assessments. For example, there will be a card that focuses on functions and return statements.
Your job is to take those cards and MASTER the concepts covered.
DO NOT JUST MEMORIZE THE EXAMPLES because if you do that, you will fail the test.
You need to understand. Practice.
The assessment will take the form of a meeting. A trusted member of our community will spend some time with you and go through the concepts.
They will write some code and ask you what it prints to the terminal. If you get the answer right then they’ll make a change to the code. they might add some more code, they might remove something, and they might swap things around.
They might also ask you specific questions about how to approach solving a problem. They could get pretty creative.
If you just memorised stuff you will fail! You need to UNDERSTAND to pass the assessment.
Tests are scary. Live tests where someone is making you think out loud are even more stressful than regular tests. We get it.
But there are a few things to keep in mind:
It is also worth understanding that coding of any sort can be a high-stress job. Let me tell you a story:
Umuzi used to be an in-person training organisation. Covid changed that. When Umuzi went remote we had to build Tilde very very quickly because we had a lot of learners to support and we needed them to succeed. And we needed to survive so we could continue our mission and help more people. Stress was just a fact of life. If we didn’t know how to handle our stress then you wouldn’t be reading this.
Also, before you get your first real job as a professional techie, you are going to get interviewed. You can also consider this practice for those scary job interviews.
As a techie, you’re going to need to be familiar with how you handle stress, and you are going to need to learn to think under pressure. If you can get that right then you will do great things. But be patient with yourself.