During your time at Turing School of Software and Design, you’ll be preparing for your first position as a software developer. In order to kick off a healthy and sustainable career as a software developer, it will be essential to learn how to talk about what you’ll contribute to a dev team, learn how to navigate your job search, and then land your first developer job. Throughout each module you’ll have workshops with the Community Affairs Manager, Employment Coordinator, as well as the Partnership Manager to effectively prepare for your career.

Professional Development is divided into 3 areas in Turing's curriculum:

• PROtocol Sessions, information listed below (Allison Reu Singer, Community Affairs Manager)
• Professional Development Sessions, information listed below (Lia James, Partnerships Manager and/or Meg Stewart, Employment Coordinator)
• Gear Up (Beth Sebian, Teaching Assistant)

• Learning to Pair
  • Portfolio Deliverable: DTR Memo from 1 paired project
• Feedback - Part I
  • Portfolio Deliverable: Feedback from and to your partners in your projects (listed under "Feedback/Community" on portfolios repo)
• Personal Branding - Part I
  • Portfolio Deliverables:
    • Resume with a summary statement and placeholder for projects and skills to be obtained during Turing
    • LinkedIn profile with a summary, descriptions under experience, and Turing under education
• Personal Branding - Part II
  • Portfolio Deliverable: Copy for your personal website
• StrengthsFinder (optional)
  • Reflections on how you'll use your strengths next module delivered to Allison

• Collaborative Communication for Working in Teams
• Project Management and Agile Practices
• [Feedback - Part II]
• Finding Job Opportunities
• Networking
• StrengthsFinder (optional)

• Job-Search Strategies
• Innovation & Creative Problem-Solving
• What Color Is Your Parachute? Flower Exercise
• Interviewing
• StrengthsFinder (optional) - tbd

• Negotiations
• Flower Exercise Follow-Up: Overcoming Job-Hunting Impostor's Syndrome
• Blog Writing & Peer Review
• StrengthsFinder (optional) - tbd

Learning how to tell your story based on the channel you’re using to communicate is important for successfully conveying how you’ll contribute to a team and the tech community. Think about how you’d like to contribute your prior experience and career to the tech community. How would you like to use your skills as a software developer? In this workshop we’ll talk through how the resume, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Github all contribute to telling your story and will support your job search.

At the end of this workshop you’ll have a resume specific for the tech industry, LinkedIn profile, Twitter account, and GitHub profile.

We do a lot of paired projects at Turing. Why? Because the software industry emphasizes pairing within its teams -- we want to mimic the industry as much as possible. To prepare you for working with others on big projects with tight deadlines, this session covers DTR (Defining the Relationship), a conversation that will help you set expectations with your partner(s), how to uphold those expectations, how to have crucial conversations when expectations are broken, how to give each other effective feedback, and how to take feedback Follow-up small groups with FEE: Continuing to build effective pairing relationships

Include a DTR memo in portfolio

Feedback for and from your project partners

As a group we will review each other’s virtual branding collateral to see how your story is received, where it needs improvement, and how it can be tied together with your personal site.

Copy and a plan for a personal site.

In Module 1, students have the opportunity to take the StrengthsFinder Assessment to gain understanding of their top 5 strengths and how to use them at Turing, in their job search, and in their career as a software developer. If students opt in, they will need to have the assessment completed by the beginning of week 2 and participate in individual reflections and 1-on-1 and small group discussions throughout this module and the following modules.

Verifying Your Signature Themes: discuss your results with someone who knows you well and reflect on them individually (individual activity) Exploring Your Signature Themes I: discuss how you define your strengths and how you can use them effectively at Turing (will be discussed with Community Affairs Manager during 1-on-1) The Challenge of Affirming My Talents: discuss examples of ways that it can be difficult to affirm your talents and how to overcome them (small groups of students facilitated by Community Affairs Manager)

Reflection on Signature Themes immediately after taking the assessment Reflection on Signature Themes and goals for the next module at the end of the module

Looking for jobs on sites like Monster.com, Indeed, and other career listing sites can be discouraging and ineffective. Let’s talk about how to find a job without relying on your resume or job postings.

Job tracking/company list setup to add five companies with contact information to the tracker.

Reflecting on feedback from Rush Hour, creating goals for Little Shop; followed up by small groups for BEE

Two paragraph reflection in your portfolio on: 1. Details on project management strategies you used in your group projects (Rush Hour and/or Little Shop); What went well? What didn’t go well? 2. How you incorporated feedback from your team members and what you learned about yourself in the process

In this session, we’ll discuss strategies for how to effectively manage projects in different iterations as well as continuing to refine communication skills when working with different team members.

Few people like the idea of networking, however building relationships with people will impact the success of a healthy job search. Learn how to build the right relationships, what networking looks like for an introvert vs. an extrovert, and how to take turn a conversation into an interview.

Cold outreach email to someone off of the job tracker to request an informational interview and three events picked out to attend in the upcoming weeks.

For students who have opted into StrengthsFinder, they will continue exploring their strengths by analyzing successes and strengths in the behavior of others

Group Dynamics and Talent Themes (small groups facilitated by Community Affairs Manager) Complementary Partners

Reflection on Signature Themes and goals for the next module at the end of the module

It’s easy to procrastinate the job search, in order to keep on track it will be important to build out a realistic strategy and timeline for the search. We want offers before we graduate, let’s figure out how to achieve that with a reliable plan!

Calendar with daily, weekly, and monthly goals

Does the idea of creativity intimidate you? Do personal projects feel daunting? In this session, we’ll break down a step-by-step framework to problem-solving to drive creativity in everyday habits and in the BEE Mod. 3 personal project.

Completed project template and pitch.

In this session, we’ll discuss 7 different aspects of your personality, goals, and preferences using a tried and true method from What Color is Your Parachute? a premier job-searching handbook. By looking inward at each of these “petals” of yourself, you will be able to define what is important to you in the job search to find a job that is the right fit for you.

Flower Exercise completed for week 1 of Mod. 4

The interview process for a Software Developer role is a bit different than a traditional interview. It’s essential to know when to say you don’t know how to do something, feel comfortable whiteboarding upon request, and be confident in your skills/abilities. In this workshop we’ll prep for those things!

Schedule a mock interview with a mentor

So few people negotiate comfortably or even try. Negotiation is an important part in growing your career. Let’s talk about how to negotiate with confidence and respect to ensure you’re appropriately advocating for your value.

As a follow-up to the Flower Exercise session from Module 3, we’ll discuss how to use these pieces to create a succinct and memorable description of who you are and what kind of developer you are as well as how to communicate that to prospective employers. This session also touches on personal branding as we’ll look at using our story in LinkedIn and on resumes.

• LinkedIn summary (2-3 paragraphs)
• 3 sentence (resume objective/summary) to 1 paragraph
• overview (Turing.io profile)