By Glorious Olajire
The IEEE – Women in Engineering, University of Ibadan Student Branch (WIE-UISB) held the WIE-UISB Technical Skill Initiative at LPI Innovation Hub, Appleton (Tech.) Road, University of Ibadan on the 29th of April 2023.
This event was in collaboration with Innovation Hub, “a place to learn sought after skills, grow your career, network and build capacity and upskill or reskill.”
The theme for the event was ‘Navigating through Tech’ and it featured various tech careers like product management, data science, mobile engineering, software engineering, data structure and algorithms and Cloud Development. Facilitatorsalso included tips on how to ace the interview process into these roles.
The event was moderated by Ope Omole, a product manager who kept the mood light by including icebreakers between speakers and encouraging the participants to speak to one another.
The first speaker was Paloma Peter Dzoho, a developer and developer community advocate who spoke on the importance of a community for a smooth tech career. She advised “to find the right community for you, get clear on your major goals. Ask yourself, is this community active, will I get opportunities to improve, volunteer, and are there mentors willing to share their knowledge?”
She continued “A community is the only place that you can join today and start contributing today. Volunteer for opportunities, collaborate with others, build relationships in and out of your community.”
In emphasizing the importance of social media, she enjoined,” Join tech twitter communities. Most Of The opportunities I have gotten we’re from twitter and try to be visible on LinkedIn”
She ended, borrowing from a quote by Odun Eweniyi COO of PiggyVest “Any room you walk into, you deserve to be there”
The next speaker was Fisayo Banjoko, a data scientist who joined the event via Google Meet.
On getting started with Data Science, she said “Most data science roles are so robust that you would need programming knowledge; python, Java, SQL is not required, but is an added advantage. Statistical experience is also very important, statistics for data mining is underrated but very important, having this would set you apart. Mathematics is also very important for data science, there are a lot of formulas like binomial theorem that you might need. You might also need calculus. Attention to detail is an important soft skill. Strong communication skill is also necessary because you would be working with various teams. “
Damilola Alimi, a mobile engineer and tech community leader spoke about the process of being a Mobile Application Developer. “I am a flutter an evangelist and I would encourage you to start your journey from flutter. You start by just going to flutter.dev. The recommended pathway is to start with Dart, move on to widget, navigator, APIs and local storage then state management.
Resources like flutter documentation, online tutorials; YouTube channels, active flutter developers on Twitter and events are very important to the mobile developer’s journey. Some active communities are Flutter bytes community, flutter Lagos and ardejob community.”
Lastly, she recommended that beginners, do their own research, try it out and find out if it is the right thing for them.
