Leveraging Tech Communities for Your Career Growth as a Tech Newbie

Tech communities are a great way to get started and find your feet in the tech industry. By joining a community, you get to engage with like-minded individuals, learn from industry experts, as well as gain valuable insights into the career path you’re looking at delving into. Whether you’re new to tech, mid level or experienced, there’s always something to benefit from a community.

In this article, I’ll be walking you through how leveraging these tech communities can impact your career growth as a tech newbie. Before that, kindly click on the link here https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1kvKpmXwoaPGE to listen to a recorded Twitter space where Florence Ogunbore and I discussed more about this topic, and how joining tech communities has shaped our individual career paths as product managers.

What are Tech Communities and How Can You Get Into One?

Tech communities are groups of individuals who share a common interest in technology. While they can take various forms, these communities are all essentially tailored towards creating a space for individuals looking to connect, provide guidance, gain and share knowledge, and collaborate on tech related projects.

Whether they take the form of online forums, social media groups, or in-person meetups within the community members, joining a tech community exposes you to valuable insights into the industry, mentorship or guidance from professionals, peer networking, and job opportunities.

Getting into the tech communities isn’t quite a hard one for individuals seeking out for one, or more. There are ample tech communities that are making sure that young talents in Nigeria, and the African tech ecosystem at large are being empowered with in-demand tech skills, as an opportunity to thrive and compete in the fast evolving Future of work https://aptlearn.io/the-skills-you-need-to-stay-competitive/

Some of these communities even provide more interesting opportunities for young creatives such as tech education scholarships, mentorship programs, resources for various tech skills, in-person community hangouts, stack challenges and competitions.

Here’s a list of some of the major tech communities in Nigeria you might want to consider:

• Ingressive4good community https://ingressive.org/
• She Code Africa https://shecodeafrica.org/
• Wetechng https://www.wetechng.com/about
• Techcabal https://techcabal.com/events
• Product buddies https://twitter.com/productbuddies?s=21&t=YMwFXMmEnvlhElpEF-Pfbw
• People in Product https://www.peopleinproduct.co/
• Technoob’s community https://twitter.com/i/communities/1571774895813689347
• Techher https://techherng.com/
• Product manager Africa https://pmafrica.co/
• Aptlearn community https://co.aptlearn.io/community/

How Can You Leverage These Communities for Your Growth?

Newbies can leverage tech communities in many ways, and at the top of the list is networking. By joining a tech community, you can connect and interact with newbies like you, innovate, and collaborate on projects that’ll help in practicalising individual knowledge and garnering more exposure. Most importantly, you can also engage with professionals in the industry for advice, tips, tutoring, career pathways, and job offerings.

Tech communities also offer a wealth of knowledge and resources for newbies to learn from. The solo learning journey can be quite overwhelming and less exciting. However, joining a community can make learning more interactive and fun, if fully maximized. You can learn and gather more industry insights by participating in online forums, attending meetups, and engaging with other community members.

Having the right community of people in your corner that supports your goals, and ambitions can high-key change the trajectory of your career journey. Tech communities can provide a supportive and guidance environment for newbies to ask questions, seek advice, get feedback on their work, and also learn from other people’s experiences. You can also leverage peer mentoring towards ensuring flexibility, consistency, and stability in your career. This has largely contributed to the success of my career transition as a biochemist turned Product manager.

Also, tech communities create room for collaboration and working on side projects with team members. With this, you get to collaborate with other members interested in increasing their knowledge and doing actual practice of their learnings. This can take the form of open source projects, or joint idea development, all of which can be added to individual portfolios. This prepares you and other participants for future opportunities, and formal work setting expectations.

Many tech communities also offer job boards, mentorship programs, and other resources to help newbies find job opportunities in the industry. Some companies prefer to hire entry level roles, internships based on referrals. Joining communities and being an active member may also earn you referrals or job placements from any member of the community. Remember, you can never tell where your next recruiter may be.

Bit of My Story As a Community Member For Inspiration

I don’t think I can talk about my journey into tech without mentioning the communities that have helped me grow this far. Ingressive4good is one of those communities for me.

I started off my journey into project management, even though I wasn’t exactly sure if that was the foot for me, until a friend randomly sent me a product management scholarship course from Entrylevel https://www.entrylevel.net/ that was powered by Ingressive4good. Well, that was my first encounter with the community.

I applied for the course with not so much hopes of getting in, but fortunately for me, I got in a few weeks after applying. Met with daunt, imposter syndrome, overwhelmness, and lack of motivation on some days, but things got better knowing that I have a community and I could see that I wasn’t alone on the journey.

With ingressive4good https://ingressive.org/, I was able to find accountability partners, Kauthar and Nabilah, who are both doing great now as product managers also. We invested in each other’s growth, worked around monthly goals, career retrospectives, and peer mentoring.

As a community member, I became aware of tech events, spaces, and forums, which its participation has really helped me embrace networking and meeting more people in the tech spaces. I’ve met quite a number of techies, learnt so much from them, and collaborated with some on a few projects which are scheduled to go live soon.

I’ve also become more confident in my journey, growing in public, and instilling impact in newbies that are looking at transitioning into tech.

Most importantly, joining a community made my transitioning journey faster and easier than the average person’s pace. It took me four months!

Key Takeaways:

“Your network is your net worth ” — Tech Communities gives you the opportunity to network.

“Be part of an active tech community today”- It makes your journey easier to navigate.

“Embrace your journey” — Learn, and build publicly.

“Growth is a continuous process” — Be open to growth, embrace it.

Let me know in the comment section if you found this article useful!

Connect with me for more articles and write-ups on product management and tech career transitioning.

See you in my next article! 😉

Image source: Google