My experience in the Devugees orientation course
by Edalí Cárdenas / Fellow at DCI
Obviously I started the course with great excitement, although I did not know exactly how it would be like. In the end, I was completely gratified with the experience.
I joined the 4-weeks course to find out if web development could be the right thing for me. So I was really expectant and maybe also a little bit worried about what was going to happen.
The story is that from the very first day at Devugees i noticed their very friendly atmosphere which in my point of view has to be one of the elements for the perfect learning environment. Furthermore, I could also see that even though the staff was getting used to the setting-up of the new location, they were well-coordinated to accomplish the schedule as it was planned.
From the beginning we were told about what would be the goals and requirements to achieve all along the course. In addition they provided us with our own laptop for working with it at the time of the course.
Of course, the core of the four weeks was learning the basics of programming, focusing on HTML and CSS. However, we also had other additional workshops to enrich our training as for example what are web technologies and current terms for internet security, how to collaborate in a scrum framework, team communication and how to be prepared for a competence assessment in the digital industry.
In addition to all of this, we also visited different companies and startups located in Berlin. I really enjoyed those tours for many reasons. First, it is very illuminating to hear from the employees about the companies’ performance. They not only opened themselves to tell us about how they actually live the experience of working in tech-driven companies but also they are willing to answer our questions and provide tips for the time when we will have to apply for a job.
What’s more, we also went to a tech job fair which took place in Berlin as well. This was our chance to see what the recruiters are looking for and learn about what skills and strengths we should have acquired by the time we apply for a position as web developers.
So we had a really good introduction to the field: we did networking with the companies and we got to know a little of the huge range of fields in which web development can be executed.
Finally, we closed our fourth week presenting the website projects that we created by ourselves with guide of the teacher.
In the end, I was quite surprised of all the things that I learned in only four weeks. I am very thankful to all the facilitators and the Devugees team.
