If you're active on social media, use the internet or most especially interested in Tech, you've most likely heard of ALX. If you haven't, that's fine too.

What is ALX

ALX is a career and leadership development platform made available to Africans by the African Leadership Group (ALG). With a mission to transform the future of Africa by creating 2M job opportunities by 2030 for young African talent, and inspiring the next generation of leaders. ALX has designed programmes to provide individuals in Africa with the in-demand skills for the 'careers that power the world'

One of such programmes offered is the Full Stack Software Engineering path. The programme runs for a duration of 12 months in which participants are required to put in about 70-hour/week. No coding experience is required as the programme builds you from the ground up, although you do have to be from Africa.

This all sounds good, right? Well, it is but it's far from easy. Although they made this very clear during my first application, this is my story...

The First Time

My journey with ALX started back in 2021 when I stumbled across their website. It looked like the perfect opportunity for me to launch my career in tech. As any reasonable human would do, I enrolled.

The application process involved basic Linux command tasks and for the final stages building a simple webpage. As a newbie to tech at the time, I found the application process challenging but very fulfilling once I was able to scale through.

Finally, I was accepted! Yayy me!

At this point, I believe I should have known that the 70 hours/ week commitment was no joke. I mean look at the application process! The programme adopts an unconventional method, one in which there are no scheduled classes but a lot of tasks and resources to help with the tasks. You learn by doing, making mistakes, researching and problem-solving.

Once the tasks got more advanced and the time and focus required to finish them increased, things got really tricky. I started as an IT Support Intern for a large and quite demanding company(a school requirement), and juggling these two was no small task.

Eventually, I started to understand the need for a 70-hour/week commitment. This was about a month into the programme and I had to make a choice. It was obvious I couldn't commit even close to 70 hours nor could I neglect my internship, you can guess the rest.

The Second Time

Months after my unfortunate dropout, I saw an ad and decided to reapply once again. This was earlier this year and I was on a break. No Internship, no school(at the time) and nothing else to take my time but ALX. Yay me.

At this point, I had taken other courses in web/software development and was a lot more confident in the tech world, it should be a breeze now, right? Well... To cut the long story short a month and some after I began the programme, the school was back in session and I had to yet again juggle classes AND a 70-hour/week ALX commitment.

Considering this is my third time applying, you can guess it didn't end much differently from the first time.

This time

One thing I picked from my past 'failures' in this programme is that to succeed in it, you need focus, drive and a good dose of resilience.

I might not have ever been able to juggle my internship along with ALX but with time management and focus, I could have scaled through the second time around. Reflecting back, I noticed a lot of things I did wrong and neglected.

This time around, I'm making this very public declaration to not give up, but rather, try again and do things differently. Taking this programme is more than just getting the certificate or getting the skills.

I can get the skills anywhere else and a similar certificate for a fee. This is more of proving to myself that I can indeed do hard things. It's showing myself that if I set my mind to do something and put in the work, no matter how challenging, I'll always pull through.

I'll be updating my journey here once the program starts on the 15th of August and I honestly can't wait.

Are you also starting the ALX programme? I'd be happy to connect or form a peer study group.

Till next time! In the words of Fred Swaniker, keep doing hard things!