Outreaching Benefits

So here it goes my first blog post, an idea I have been toying around with for some time now. Over the past few weeks, I got the opportunity to be involved in an outreach program between RedHat mobile and a local secondary school here in Waterford. This was a first for me, as I hang my head in shame, I have never volunteered my time before, and I also never mentored anyone. So with that in mind, I am going to try capture what I got out of being involved in the outreach program, and in hope spur someone to look at volunteering and giving their time to help others.

Satisfaction

This might be an obvious benefit to volunteering but it was not apparent to me just how satisfying it is giving your time to help others. It is hard to put this benefit into words without sounding selfish, but one of the major factors that added to the satisfaction of the outreach program was the feeling that maybe just maybe I have inspired one of the students to seek a career in an IT role or at the very least explore the idea of a career in IT.

Motivating Others

Which leads me nicely to my next benefit. This stems from being a mature student, I never had the opportunity these lads have right now, and who knows if I had been given this kind of exposure to the IT world at such a young age it may have directed me down a different path. This is something I find hard to capture into words but inevitably it leads back to adding to the satisfaction of volunteering your time

New Experiences

So moving away from the satisfaction, being part of the program opened so many doors to new experiences as part of my internship. Away from the day to day jobs of being a software engineer in an agile workplace, from stand-ups to retrospectives, code reviews to submitting PR’s and everything in between, the outreach project let me take on roles which would not normally be available to me, I got to take the role of an agile practitioner (scrum-master) and lead a couple of stand-ups, I have got to see a project through the eyes of a product owner, along with just seeing a project come from an initial idea to delivering an MVP. It is these experiences that gave me a whole new look on my day to day tasks, it is easy to get tunnel vision and focus on the Jira ticket right in front of you, thanks to the outreach program it has shown me the bigger picture and just how many moving parts are involved in bringing a project to fruition.

Networking

Being from a small city where everyone seems to know everyone it is easy to overlook how important networking can be. And it is through pushing out my boundaries and getting involved in the outreach program that I have been meeting people that I would have never had the pleasure of meeting before, along with the conversations sparked on the basis of the program alone.

Learning

No matter the career, in order to be successful you have to continue to learn and improve, and a knock on effect I have seen from mentoring is the constant improvement and learning that seems to occur naturally in order to be able to give just advice and help the lads with the problems they incur with the task at hand. It is through this learning and noticing my own weaknesses that I have been able to improve and gain confidence professionally.

TLDR

I have not seen a downside to volunteering or being involved in an outreach program, everyone benefits and no one loses, I gain personal improvement while those I help gain my experience and hopefully learn from me. It is with that I would encourage as many people to get involved in such programs or simply give some time to others.