Welcome to Personal Development at Code Your Future

Why Personal Development?

At Code Your Future our aim is to empower people to change their lives by giving them the tools to have a successful career in tech.
We choose to work with people facing massive barriers to employment. Learning tech skills alone are not enough to become employable. Most of the time our trainees are facing challenges in their personal lives, also requiring support to improve their soft skills.

What can we do?

We developed the Personal Development (PD) syllabus in response to these challenges. We work in conjunction with the Tech Education team to help trainees manage their learning. We focus on the personal development aspects which are key to effectively learning any new skill.
Depending on your interest and experience you will find a role that suit you. Some are better for new volunteers whilst others are targeted at experienced volunteers.

How do we do that?

From Fundamentals to Final Projects, the basic concept we want our trainees to understand is that agile teams use people with different skill sets playing different roles (e.g. designer, developer, QA) to produce something together.
Each module of our software development course is four weeks and has one hour-long PD session. Each PD session aims to use the following building blocks:
  • Requirements: Gathering and understanding requirements based on real-life scenarios and having a shared understanding of what needs to be done
  • Planning and preparation: Breaking it down into small tasks
  • Make it: Producing something together
  • Presentation: Presenting the product or the journey
We are developing the following soft skills:
  • Communication; public speaking
  • Teamwork; resolving conflicts
  • Problem Solving
  • Time Management
  • Confidence; transferable skills, self-marketing
  • Leadership; goal setting
  • Ownership
  • Risk-taking
  • Inclusivity
  • English Language; professional writing

Existing Resources

This is a living document (and currently under revision). Expect it to change and grow over time. If you'd like to suggest an enhancement or change please speak to the Head of Personal Development.