Temitope Akintola, Software Engineer at TeamApt was an amazing opening to the IG Live series with TeamApt, a series of conversations that is valuable to African youths looking to build a tech career in Marketing, Design, Product Management and Software Development.
Here are 5 things we learnt from our conversation with Temitope;
1. Stay Persistent
When Temitope applied for a job at TeamApt, she was first rejected but she didn’t let that stop her. She knew what she wanted and she went for it. She visited the TeamApt office a second time and dropped her CV. She was given the role of a Customer Service Representative and in no time, was promoted to operations.
Times will always change, rejections will always come but it takes only one ‘yes’ to open up more opportunities to grow. Make sure to always look out for opportunities to sell yourself and when they come and don’t work as you had originally planned, dust yourself up and keep fighting.
2. Never stop learning
“Unless you try to do something other than what you have already mastered, you will not grow.” The way to stay winning and keep growing is to keep opening your mind to the possibility of what could be.
Despite the fact that Temitope already got what she wanted (a job), she didn’t stop doing the hard work of learning and satisfying her curiosity. While she received customers complaints and related them to the dev team, she wished she could solve those problems too. She took a sabbatical and attended a bootcamp to learn software development.
3. Work for value
A lot of times, we find it hard to decide whether or not to take a role that pays little to nothing. However, the way to hack that is to define what value means to you at that time and for that opportunity. What represents value for you? Is it Money? Is it Knowledge, a Training? A Relationship? Network? Whatever value means, you decide that and take on roles that benefit you and your goals in the long run
After her training, she went back to TeamApt to start her career as a developer even if that meant taking a pay-cut and starting her career as an intern. After the 3 month internship program, she got fully absorbed into the system. She got her value.
4. Start now
Temitope talked about how dreams may seem unrealistic at first. It may have sounded funny to say that she wanted to move from being a Customer Service Representative to becoming Software Engineer. But taking the first step closer to your goal doesn’t make it look so far away anymore. For Temitope, her first step was talking to a developer at Teamapt to get some guidance. Her next step was attending the bootcamp and then the internship and after all that, being a Software developer didn’t seem like such a big thing.
5. Share your journey
Temitope got an amazing opportunity to be mentored by a team lead at TeamApt just by sharing what she knew and was up to on LinkedIn. She didn’t have to have the awkward conversation of requesting for mentorship from someone. All she did was share.
We put this article out for you to learn from because Temitope shared. She got a mentorship opportunity because she shares. Share your work and let the world see what you’re up to. Build publicly because you never know who’s watching.
2 Comments
Fantastic
Thank you