5 Ways a Coding Mentor Can Help You BE SMART!

A Coding Mentor can help you enter a career that makes you always employable; coding and programming is the future!

Why Would You Want a Coding Mentor?

When it pertains to a professional career, having mentors, coaches, and sounding boards is crucial to success. As a sports example, currently, one of the top quarterbacks in the NFL is Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs.

He led the Chiefs to a Super Bowl victory and won the MVP honors in an epic comeback win!

When you examine his career, you begin to see the mentors, coaches, and sounding boards he has in his life that prepared him for success. It started with his Dad!

Patrick Mahomes’ Dad set the tone for his son to understand the importance of mentors, coaches, and sounding boards. When he entered the NFL, he sat under the tutelage of journeyman quarterback Alex Smith for an entire year; that time dramatically truncated his learning curve!

If you watch him on the sidelines talking with the various coaches, you see a young man who embraces his tutors, mentors, and coaches’ wisdom, insights, and information. If you are going to become a top tier software engineer, coder, or programmer, a coding mentor is the absolute best route for your career path. Let’s take a look at the reasons why.

Genuine mentors have acquired significant professional experience, which allows them to share immensely beneficial expertise, wisdom, and insights. As a newbie, you need this input “IF you want to avoid unnecessary pitfalls, sidestep time waste and eliminate stunting your career growth.

What do coding mentors do? They help you devise a plan to go from zero to $100k+. Honestly, if you are putting in the work to learn coding or programming, why would you settle for less money when it is readily available? Make sense? That stated, let’s examine why a coding mentor is crucial to your success.

A Coding Mentor Will Help You BE SMART

If you don’t know, SMART is the acronym for Specific, Measurable, Actionable Relevant, and Timely. If your game plan is to become a Senior Software Engineer, Senior Developer, or a Senior Coder, you need a strategy.

If your game plan is to launch a company or build the next FaceBook, Tik Tok, Uber, or Lyft – like the QB, Patrick Mahomes, you will need mentors, coaches, and tutors to help you to BE SMART!

Most college students who graduate with worthless degrees do so because they did not have knowledgeable mentors who cared about their success. Don’t dig yourself into their rabbit hole; BE SMART! The first part of “BE SMART” is defined as being Specific.

A Coding Mentor Will Help You Be Specific

Coding mentors will help you be specific in terms of your goals, skill sets, learning abilities, and the future. Their firsthand experience in the trenches provides you with wisdom and insights you will not glean from book knowledge or being on your own.

There is a countless number of pathways to travel in this high-demand career field. Namely, Python, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, Node JS, React JS, Java, and the list goes on. Which path(s) will you take?

Are you more suited for being a Project Manager, Senior Developer/Coder/Engineer, CEO, Freelancer, or Consultant? These are questions you need to ask and answer before committing to any course of action. That way, you can craft your path based on your vision. Talking about these issues with mentors makes a huge difference in becoming specific about your career goals.

A Coding Mentor Will Help You Be Measurable

Your vision must have milestones and other elements that ensure you are on the right path. In this regard, your Coding Mentor becomes your sounding board.

They help you refine the rough edges of your game plan to make sure you are achieving milestones that propel you into big WIN after big WIN!

Think about the countless number of college grads who are paying off student loans on worthless degrees. They achieved their targeted milestones before the big win, which was to graduate.

The problem is, their milestones led them down a debt-laden rabbit hole with valueless degrees.

At the end of the day, what measurable results will your goals manifest? Will your cumulative milestones add up to $100k in student loan debt, an unemployment rate of 17.54%, and a college degree that has a paltry earning capacity of $30k per year?

Or, will your cumulative milestones add up to $0 in student loan debt and a single-digit unemployment rate with an annual earning capacity of $100k+? Plus, the room to expand your horizons into ownership?

A Coding Mentor Will Help You Be Actionable

Are your goals actionable? Meaning, are they definable, concrete, and crystal clear?

An example of actionable goals is to say that a person wants to lose 30 lbs within the next six months; what are their actionable milestones to achieve their end goal?

It would be something like this:

I will work out 3 days a week
I will walk 4 miles 4 days a week
I will not eat food after 8 pm
I will drink water every morning
I will cut junk food from my diet
My daily diet will include power foods

Those are all actionable and measurable goals. If a person sticks to that plan, they will shed the extra pounds. Your game plan MUST include actionable goals!

A Coding Mentor Will Help You Be Relevant

Back to our college students with worthless degrees, those graduates had milestones and mini-goals to help them attain their goals of receiving degrees in Fine Arts, Criminal Justice, and Sociology.

The problem is, with those degrees, the graduates ended up with an education that made them unmarketable and irrelevant to the job market.

In other words, they achieved their goals of completing their freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years. Their grades were stupendous! Their class attendance was pristine.

But after graduating, they could only land jobs at places such as Starbucks, Walmart, Uber, Lyft, and Amazon drivers, jobs that had nothing to do with their degrees.

A great coding mentor will help make sure that your coding/programming goals are relevant to the job market (today and in the future) so that you do not end up with worthless programming or coding skills!

A Coding Mentor Will Help You Be Timely

All SMART Goals have timelines and deadlines. Let’s say you are starting to learn Python Programming from scratch. What are your milestones, goals, timelines, and deadlines? Here is an example:

Goal: Become a Junior Python Developer

Timeline: 3 months

Milestones

Core Python
Python basics: Variable, conditions, while loop, for loop, list, function
Python frameworks: Django, Numpy, matplotlib, pandas
Basic Algorithms, OOP, Data structures
5 python projects
35+ Python coding problems
Github, IDE, API, database, hosting, and services

Here is what the actionable goals might look like:

Study 7 hours per day, 7 days per week
5 hours of learning per day
2 hours of practice per day
Learn the basics in two weeks

In this game plan, a person could become a Junior Python developer within 3 months. Here is an excellent point; when it comes to coding and programming, most newbies have no idea where to start, what to aim for, or the acceptable timelines and deadlines.

Hence, the reason a number of them wander careerwise, get taken advantage of by companies that underpay them, or otherwise fail miserably. Your coding and programming aspirations should have time tables attached to them at every step.

How long will it take you to go from entry-level Python Developer to Python Developer to Senior Level Python Developer? After Senior Python Developer, what’s your next move, and what’s the time frame? Will you be ready to launch a startup? Become a COO or a CEO? These options are all on the table with your skill sets and experience.

With the right mentors, coaches, and sounding boards, you could rapidly break that $100k milestone and turn it up from there. This is your clarion call, Coders and Programmers; let’s GO!