Niman’s Career Shift — The Transition from Regional Development Officer to a Database Developer at Telesom
👋 Hey! Welcome to Fikrcamp Newsletter!
We are really excited to see Fikrcmap Alumni Niman Bashir land a Database Developer job at the biggest telecommunication company in Somaliland - Niman has been working with Telesom for the past five years working in the logistics department for the first 2 years of that period. He later transitioned to a Regional Development Officer and he served the company for the better part of his tenure with the telecommunication giant.
Despite being a technically gifted engineer now, his passion has changed over the years. “I ended up in tech by an accident, fresh out of high school my passion was to do medicine and as a start, I enrolled into Edna Aden University majoring in Dentistry, I dropped out because of some changes done by the university,” said Niman as we sit with him to share his story earlier last week. He continued “After a few months a friend of mine was going to enroll himself at New Generation University under the computer science school and he forced me to join him, later the interest in the course of study was growing in me and I graduated with a Bachelors of Science in computer science”
In a country where the unemployment rate is high, especially amongst university graduates, Niman was lucky to obtain an employment contract from Telesom but the job had a loose connection with his course of studies, which made him lose touch with his technical skills.
At a Telesom event, his spark was re-ignited while having a conversation with an engineer and a former Telesom employee by the name of Mukhtar Mohamed (Janogale) - Hearing about the opportunities that come with being a developer and the shortage of engineers in both local and global markets forced him to brush up his skills and jump back on coding.
“While studying HTML and CSS at home I saw a Facebook post by Som Digital Solutions announcing they will recruit two interns from Fikrcamp (Previously Return Dev) graduates, I was intrigued and applied to the program, after the screening interview I was not selected but I persisted and made additional calls and finally joined the first cohort of Fikrcamp”
The main challenges reported by Niman include imposter syndrome, in the beginning, he compared himself with veteran coders and this caused a lot of self-doubt in his abilities, but he later overcame this challenge by pushing through the hurdles and building his skills.
“I swear The four months program of Fikrcamp has been more beneficial to me than the 3 years I have spent at university, thanks to Abdulladif Roble (Fikrcamp founder and lead instructor) and mentors, I have learned not only technical skills but also strengthen my critical thinking, problem-solving and logic skills along the way”
Niman has plans to build, code, and launch his software products and has aspirations of becoming a social entrepreneur, his advice for emerging coders is to find guidance for proper pathways to master the skills and consistently show up to better themselves not only at coding but essentially at everything in life.