During the foundations weeks i have learnt a few things about myself thanks to the human skills side of things. The one that will stick with me the most would be how much i enjoy meditating a few times per day. I am not joking when i say that the first time i saw the meditation links, i thought to myself that it was a waste of time. I don't think that meditation is stupid but adapting it to my life everyday was something i did not see coming. The first few days it felt like a chore but during the harder weeks where the content was a little harder, i felt really good accommodating the exercises before and during my study, i felt really good and ready after my breathing control exercises and now i think of them as necessary when i study.
Another thing i have come to learn is how much i enjoy working with others, i don't have an issue with learning alone and during these weeks and i have spent more time being comfortable than not but i noticed how hard it was for me at the beginning to get into study mode and organise my study space and routine. Human Skills learning helped me realise that i am also one to take a lot of work at once even if it means i will be putting myself in a tight spot. I have been working hard to space out my work and hoping to keep my study consistent and tidy with more regular lumps of work.
I noticed how much i knew about human skills due to my experiences. I have worked in industries where the human skills are very important like customer service, hospitality and property/ casualty insurance. All of these need a certain level of human skills and i was happy to see that i had picked up a lot of the skills and somewhat retained most of the information i have aquired along the way. While learning humans skills i was proud to see that nothing was entirely new to me, all of the aspects were ralatable and instead of learning them it felt like a good and much needed memorey refresh.
Values:
These are the core beliefs and standards that guide our behaviour and decision-making. Our values are essential in learning situations as they are the building blocks of your learning path.
Integrity for example, is the value that keeps us honest with ourselves, specially in a self learning environment avoiding shortcuts.
Discipline and tidiness is another good example, your work space or area can be a mirror of your work.
Keeping things a tidy and clean is always a helpful trait and that goes for both outside the computer and inside of it,
we have learnt that a clean code is the way to go, keeping things tidy and readable often reflect good values like professionalism.
Empathy:
The ability to understand the feelings and perspectives of others. I personally believe that empathy is an extremely important ability to have when working or studying alongside other people.
For learning there are many reasons why empathy is so important like peer support and improved communications.
Peer support is essentially understanding when a peer or team member is struggling and offering help, being able to comprehend and apply it is very helpful while learning in groups.
Improved communications implies that a person with empathy will make asking questions or answering them more effective and supportive.
Self-Awareness:
I believe that Self-awareness means to understand yourself, your strengths, values and limitations. As a crucial part of learning i think that self-awareness helps us in many aspects of learning.
It helps us recognise our limitations and identifying learning gaps, in order to improve our learning styles while figuring out how we learn best.
It also helps us by encouraging reflection previous work and learning from mistakes, allowing us to forge a stronger path going forward.
The thing that surprised me the most was the amount of human skills learning we have done. It surprised me in a good way, i believe it is extremely important not only for work but for life in general. The reason it surprised me is because when i think of tech school, human skills is not something that pops into my mind straight away. Life is obviously a more general concept and therefore we make the connection with human skills a lot faster and easier. I think it has a lot of positives and i am thankful to Dev Academy for the information and challenges they have presented us, as weird as it seemed to me at first, i have to say that i am glad that it is part of the course work.
I think one of the hardest things in Human skills is to measure them or assess them. How do we accurately know exactly how good we are at a specific human skills. In technical skills it is a lot easier to measure someone’s expertise in a subject but in human skills we have to interact with someone in order to get feedback and from the feedback we can make our own assessment but it will never be as accurately measured as some other skills. The sprint where we had to research and find our values and limitations was a really good one as i found a lot of tests to do on myself to have a better understanding of where i was at.
To prepare us for the future and the programming world. As we have been told at Dev academy, in the real world, software is rarely built alone, most developers work in teams and are always communicating with people such as designers, engineers and even users. I believe that the companies don't hire people only for their tech sckills, they want people who can adapt, communicate clearly, collaborate and problem-solve effectively. Self-awareness, growth mindset and emotional intelligence help students learn faster and recover from setbacks. Bootcamps are intense and i think the human skills will help most of us stay motivated and emotionally regulated.
Even though i felt at many times of the course that learning the human skills was getting in the way of the tech learning, i do not mean that we should not have it as part of the course. As i have mentioned before i think they are essential not only for work but for life in general. I do not feel like it was a waste of time at all, we are preparing ourselves to join an industry where most of the work is in team environments and having these skills will benefit us all a great deal. Even though we might not appreciate them as much as we should right now, i am positive that we will all be extremely grateful once we realise how much we need them in the programming world.