Community: A Tool for your Career Growth

OUTLINE:

What is a Community?

Why are Communities Important?

How to Identify the Right Community for me.

Social Media Platforms used for Building Communities.

Online Communities You can join.

WHAT IS A COMMUNITY?

The Oxford Dictionary defined a Community as the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common. With that, we can define a tech community as one comprising various tech professionals at different levels whose sole aim is to share knowledge/information, learn from one another and grow in their respective careers.

Communities exist both offline and online. For the sake of this article, emphasis will be laid on the online community.

WHY IS A COMMUNITY IMPORTANT?

The following are benefits attached to joining a tech community.

Support: Communities exist to provide support for you. When faced with tough projects, you can always reach out to the community for assistance. The community manager can amplify your voice and draw attention to what you need help with.

Access: As mentioned earlier, various communities comprises people at different levels in their career. You can get community insights, tips on how to pass an interview and gain access to a mentor via the community. Ordinarily, this might not be possible but because you leveraged a platform that brought everyone together, it is.

Resources: Oftentimes, you learn about a new release on the market from the community. Reviews about a product that can enhance your work load could suffix. Exploring this from the information provided saves you time and cost of having to make a blind purchase and find out that such tool isn't suitable for what you actually need. You can get reviews, opinions and suggestions on alternatives to the product in the community. This significantly increases your chances of success in your field.

The benefits of joining a community are endless. Scholarships, internship and job openings are shared. Answers to questions, suggestions on the frameworks/tools to adopt, best ways to use them, and libraries available for use either paid or free. Community is definitely your go-to place.

HOW TO IDENTIFY THE RIGHT COMMUNITY FOR YOU

Identifying the right community to join starts from knowing your career path.

If you are a software developer, there are communities meant specifically for developers and vice versa. However, there are communities that comprises people across other careers. They are separated from each other through various channels/groups but have a general channel/group where they can interact with people from other fields. This improves your interpersonal/communication skills.

SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS USED FOR BUILDING COMMUNITIES:

Here are some of the social media platforms that organizations adopt to build their online communities. They include but not limited to:

1. Slack

2. Facebook

3. Discord

4. Quora

5. Reddit

For the sake of this article, most of the communities that will be shared are on Slack and Discord.

ONLINE COMMUNITIES YOU CAN JOIN:

1. Developer Career (DevCareer) Community - Click here to join

2. Nexascale - Join here

3. Wetech - Join here (For Women Only)

4. Interswitch IDC - Join here

5. Testars Quarter Community (For QA Engineers) - Join here

6. SheCodeAfrica - Join here (For Women Only)

7. Google Developer’s Group (GDG) - Find a chapter close to you and Join

8. Ingressive For Good (I4G) - Join here

9. Devcentre square - Join here

10. Figma Africa - Join here

11. Usable - Join here

12. Product Dive - Join here

13. Online Geniuses for Digital Marketers - Join here

14. Flutteristas - For females and non-binary people using Flutter - https://flutteristas.org/

15. Flutter Developers Community - Join here

In conclusion, community is a place to give and receive help. Actively engaging in the community, offering support and assistance to community members is not the work of the community manager alone. As a member, you owe it to the community to share and help resolve issues when they arise. The benefits we gain from communities come with little or no charge at all, to ensure the constant growth of such community, we as individuals ought to play our part to keep it alive and running. Join a community today and contribute.