HOW I BUILT MY PORTFOLIO - CELESTINE OMIN, SENIOR TECHNICAL CONSULTANT AT ANDELA.

I was browsing the Internet yesterday doing some sort of research on the next article to post on this blog. In the course of my research I bumped into an interview by TECHPOINT on Celestine Omin (pictured below). It was really inspirational. I learnt a lot from that interview, and decided to share a part of it here. Hope you find it inspirational too.

 Who Is Celestine Omin? 

Celestine Omin is a Senior Technical Consultant at Andela. He was formally a software engineer at Konga Online Shopping Ltd for many years. He is a graduate (B.Sc) of Computer Science from the University of Calabar, Calabar Cross River State Nigeria.

Celestine Omin, Senior Technical Consultant at Andela.

During the interview, a lot of things were said, but what really struck me was when he was asked about how he started and what his advice to the younger generation is. This is what he had to say.

"If tech comes to you naturally, you should pursue it. Forget the glitz and the glamour that comes with it, just focus on why you are doing what you are doing. Money shouldn’t be your motivation because this is not one of those get rich quick schemes. I am still at that point in my life where I don’t think I know anything. On a scale of 1-100, I think I am on 2; there’s so much to be done. Seek to meet people who are more experienced than yourself. Don’t put boundaries around yourself, go beyond your local community and with the help of the internet you can meet virtually any person. So keep learning, keep practising and seek for opportunities to do things for people even if it’s free because it will give you hands-on experience on how to do things in real life and if you do it successfully it’s easy to transition to somewhere else.

As a young person leaving school don’t wait for the opportunity to come to you because 9 out of 10 cases will never come to you. You have to create your own opportunities. What I used to do when in University was to build and maintain websites for churches for free and I was using that to build my own portfolio so that when I met a potential employer I could show the things I had done. Nobody cares if you are paid or not, they just need to know you can do it. This gives you an extra step through the door as opposed to someone just looking for a job.

Collaborate where possible, everything shouldn’t be about money. Knowledge before the money, as long as nobody is saying do pro-bono work all the rest of your life. Let the money be the secondary thing and the knowledge and the impact you can make be the primary thing."

Note: Celestine’s advice is not restricted to only those in the tech world. If you are in any business, especially those ones that has to do with rendering services, you can as well apply this same principle to build your portfolio.

WOW!! How about that? I hope you this was inspiring?  Don’t forget to drop you comment below.

Source:Techpoint.ng

Got a business to advertise/market? Please CONTACT US we can be of help to you.