Bootcamp challenges and how I have adapted in the last few weeks

BYIRINGIRO Yves
Nov 6 · 3 min read

Adaptability is the quality of being able to adjust to new conditions. Over the past few weeks, I have had to adapt to change in environment and a bunch of other challenges I faced. Some of the challenges I have adapted to are self-learning, time management, staying up at night and waking up early, seeking and implementing feedback, Time management, Writing Professionally and Project Management.

Self-learning. Prior to this boot camp challenges, I usually find it difficult to learn on my own, however, so far I have been able to adopt this method constantly. Adapting to this challenge has given me the ability to identify problems and quickly look for effective solutions on my own, either from the internet, from my colleagues or my Learning Facilitator Assistant. This challenge provided me with new opportunities to learn something new at my own pace and time. You get to learn how to actively look for solutions instead of having solutions brought to you. Moreover, I have been able to adapt to changes in the environment due to the ability to learn fast. I have learnt to read through resources or materials, digest them, take the part I find useful to my work and implement it effectively while managing time.

Time Management. Since I started this boot camp, it seems that 24 hours a day is never enough. I used to wonder how some people achieve so much more with their time and I achieve so little. So, I had to practice time management by organizing and planning how to divide my time between specific activities. This has helped to improve my productivity, reduce my stress level, increased opportunities for me advance in my daily tasks and reduced missing deadline.

Staying up at night and waking up early. So apart from self-learning, I’ve also had to adapt to staying up at night to work on my challenges and at the same time wake up early, so as to report to the Andela office for the boot camp. At first, it was difficult, but over time I adapted to this method, as I tend to work better and more effectively at night with no distractions.

Seeking feedback and implementing them. One thing I think I used to have problem with is seeking and implementing feedback. During the course of this boot camp, I have learnt that feedback can illuminate blind spots about your behaviour or work that you just can’t see without input from others. I have also had to adapt to the flow of seeking feedback, reflecting on it and acting on it.

Writing professionally. This has to be one of the main challenges I have encountered during this boot camp, the daily learning outputs include writing a blog post daily for the first week. This was a challenge because I didn’t really like writing. However, after writing the first two posts, I started getting the hang of it. Going forward, I will like to continue writing blog posts.

Project management. This is the practice of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria at the specified time. I won’t really call this a challenge, its more like a skill I improved on using a tool Pivotal Tracker. Pivotal Tracker is a story based digital project management tool which allows team members to easily react to real-world changes and collaborate instantly. I had to adapt to working on Pivotal Tracker, writing stories on the board, assigning tasks and executing them in an orderly form.

thank for your reading

Author: BYIRINGIRO Yves

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