Introduction

The idea of this learning plan is to create a plan of how I see the next 14-15 weeks of my life going and what I want to happen after the completion of this.

My Career Goal

I'm still employeed and taking a career break so I have a direct short term goal after comlpeting this course. My long-term goal is a bit cloudy I need to see if I really enjoy this line of work.

Short Term Goal- I want to be able to go back to my current employeer and utilize the skills and knowledge gained from this course to make advancements in what I could produce before this course. I was given assurances when they offered me a career break that I would have some pathways setup to use the skills and progress to the Dev side if that's what I wanted.

Long Term Goal- My long term goal is to have web devlopment in-grained in my career. I want to contiously gain new skills and build upon them. Honestly I'm not sure if I want a career that is 100% web development but I know I want it to be part of my career.

Strenghts, Limitations & Growth

My greatest strength comes from Passion. If I am passionate about something it almost becomes all consuming. The problem with that is I tend to veer off course sometimes. I will go down those rabbit holes and start looking at components that I do not need.

A limitation of mine is time managment. Im historically very poor at time management, all through Uni I was the caffine addict staying up 2 nights in a row to write a paper. Personally I feel like I have gotten better at time management since working in a presure environment. The reason I think this is because I hate disapointing people, so my concern is that now that the outcomes of this are solely going to impact myself. I don't want to fall back into an old behaviour. I go into this more in my learning and how I want to combat this. Also this learning plan creation came at the right time feel myself slipping.

How do I want to Grow

My main priority for soft skills growth is collaboration. Historically I have had really bad collaboration experinces stemming from UNI projects that have made really dislike collaboration. Some of which may have been partly my fault in not trying enough to colloberate.

Another one is confidence. Not Ego but confidence in speaking up and questioning a way of doing something.

How will I manage

How I plan my Days

I want to by consistient in my days. In some previous analyis I think my best time to work is in the morning fresh out of bed with the distractions of the outside world easily being tuned out.

My plan is to start every day at 7am and work through to 4pm. The first part of the day I want to commit to learning new things where I can focus better and retain information. The second part of the idealy is used to put that into practice. This is where I need to be actively doing something in order for me to focus.

When it goes it wrong {Hope for the best plan for the worst}

Where I see myself going wrong is in time boxing and meeting objectives. I tend to over complicate things and need to focus on the task at hand. One thing I have been doing in order to combat this is by writting down the objectives from the foundations handbook and having that visible on my screen at all times.

Asking for Help

I never ask for help, personally I view myself when I ask for help as not good enough. When I see others do that it never pops in to my head. I have a strict sort of internaly policy when it comes to asking for help. Ask once how that's fine don't ask again. My commimetent to asking for help, is to try first. I want to try and figure it out for myself in a timely manner. But after that I want to not be afraid to ask for help, be that my fellow cohort members or my facilator.

Looking at all the projects that people have been working on its evident that there is a lot of skilled people in this programe with skills leaps above my own. To not use there help through the slack channels would be a waste.

Joesph my foundations facilator is another resource I can use for questions and help. Also I hope I never have to do this but I can talk with him and if I have any challanges completing something there may be the option to have some sort of extension
Extensions are a short term soloution and the last thing I want to be doing is playing catchup

What are my expectations from my facilator

The facilator sessions are for Me

In my first catchup I was made aware that these sessions are for me and led my be. Very different to what I expected. For the next session I have I want to give it some structure, what was I struggling with and where he may be able to help out.

Expectations

My main expectation is feedback, I want to use it as time to talk through the project I am working on for that week. I will have issues things never go smoothly and I want to talk with him around how I can solve this or do better.

Also want to use the time as a place to have general discussions. The first one was good he re assured me about some dificulties I was having with CSS. There will be doubts and this is the time to express them.

What is your long term goal and/or career pathway?

I mentioned in one reflection how the goal I set at the start is not great in terms of the growth mindset. When learning about that it mentions about that this needs to be fueled by your hunger to learn not your need for approval. I mentioned in my last goal about wanting to bring what I learn back to my current employer. That is the part I want to change about my Short Term Goal.

Short Term- I want to be able to use and understand web development practices and feel confident implementing and planning any endeavor I take on.

Long Term Goal- My long Term goal is to be involved in producing something I am truly passionate about. Thinking this could be game design or personal projects. I want to move in to a line of work where I feel driven by the work I do as well as the people around me.

What do you think your biggest strengths and limitations will be in Bootcamp?

My biggest weakness was definitely time keeping. I think/hope that with the more structured bootcamp this will be easy to manage. I don't think anything has changed as such. I noticed that my shy reserved nature was tested a bit. Reached out to someone to talk about the carnival challenges and the same with the one on one active listening exercises. All though I was very nervous going into that chat.

What do you think your biggest non-technical challenge at bootcamp will be?

My biggest non-technical challenge will be I'm afraid of being wrong and embarrassing myself. I will definitely naturally shy away from any "how do you do that" sort of question to a group. This also limits my ability to function collaboratively. For example I look at how other people solve a problem for the Kata or the Carnival and think to myself what backwards ass way have I done this.

What non-technical skills - human skills - would you like to see developed in yourself while at EDA?

Linked to the one above. More confidence especially around contributing ideas. Whether if its no one cares if its dumb or people want judge you for it at all. I think its kinda linked to that idea of I don't want to damage my won ego if I'm not 100%.

Another one is around the mentality that it seems alot of programmers have around how they work. They do short focused bursts. Would really like to foster and build on that.

What are your expectations from the Bootcamp team?

My expectation is that the course is quite test and learn. This is how I like to learn you get given some sort of background information of what/how to do it then you apply to it a real scenario. If I get stuck I can talk to the group and facilitator if needed.

My main anti expectation is that we are not shown something and this is how this works now we move. If that's how its done that's fine but for me I will need to play around with it in my own time to truley understand it.

What are your expectations of yourself on Bootcamp?

My expectations is to learn new skills and put them into practice with a squad of like-minded people. I also want to develop some core skills and increase my 'employability' factor in that department.

To achieve this I kinda always want to feel out of my comfort range. I will very easily be the headphones on sit down shut up kid.

My commitment, which may sound odd I wnat to be as apporachable as possible. I am never going to listen to music or do anything like that during the course (not sure if allowed). Also when I get stuck I want to talk with other people if they are willing about how they are doing it. My idea here is to learn how what they did to do it at the point im stuck on. I don't want to copy pasta the entire function, possibly they can explain the rubbery ducky method of it and then I could engineer it from there.

A personal commitment that I will be doing is making sure Im in the perfect state of mind to learn. I have gotten enough sleep etc. Not like Uni where showing is the hard part.