Preparing for your Skilled Mock Technical Assessment
If you are finding this blog I suspect you, like me, recently graduated from a Software Engineering program. If that is the case then first things first —
This is a huge deal and I hope you gave yourself a few well deserved days off before starting to “pound the pavement” as they say. If you are a Flatiron School grad then you have a lot of prerequisites to get through before declaring your job search and no doubt you are excited to get going on that.
When I graduated the most daunting task before me felt like the Mock Technical Challenge. I had no idea where to even start with preparation. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t think I had absorbed the material and that I was ready to be interviewed — but rather I felt so confronted with all the things I didn’t know yet that I was sure my interviewer was likely to ask me.
Should I focus on data structures and algorithms? Should I go back and review everything ever known to man about React? Should I just keep building projects to study or focus on Big O?
The truth is there is no perfect answer to this. Every interviewer has a different set of skills they are likely to test you on. That being said — preparing efficiently can really help you out.
So here are some tips and tricks that prepared me for my Skilled assessment and got me those 5 out of 5 stars.
Reach out to Classmates
When we all graduated, my cohort made sure to stay in touch. People formed study groups to practice solving problems on a daily basis. We also generally communicated about what each of us experienced in the room. Knowing that other people struggled is helpful for building confidence. You aren’t alone in this fight! It is incredibly important when you get in there yourself. It’s going to be challenging but having the collective knowledge of what you learned together in your back pocket will give you an upper hand. This is important for real interviews as well. There are so many resources out there for what to expect when interviewing for Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. It’s important to use every tool in your arsenal to get through these things.
Practice Timed Assessments
From Leetcode to HackerRank and CodeWars to Geeks for Geeks, there are an infinite amount of coding websites out there. My personal favorite right now happens to be HackerRank, but it’s really about getting a feel for what you like. I have found that I like to work toward a goal so getting little certifications has been helpful. Work towards one of their goals and then proudly flaunt it on your LinkedIn! It’ll be killing two birds with one stone — developing your skills while also helping boost your networking profiles.
Clean up Your Code Base
This is the most annoying bit. Go back and clean up your projects. Add things you didn’t get to add. Reformat things and make it more presentable. Even if you think you did a pretty good job keeping it organized in the first place there can always be improvements. Add notes for anyone going through it on your repo! You will gain two important things with this.
Firstly, your projects will attract more interest for recruiters and job opportunities. Then later when they are attracted to the projects and sift through the code they won’t just be confronted with the mess of a speedy project build.
Secondly, you are bound to break some things and that is going to force you to reexamine work that you scribbled together previously. It’s great practice!
Review Topics from a Different Perspective
One of the best things that happened to me when I first graduated was being recommended a resource for another online bootcamp! I know what you’re thinking ..
“WAIT — I just did a bootcamp why would I do another one?”
Hear me out! There are so many free programs out there. No doubt you stumbled upon a few before your official program. I for one had gotten pretty far along on certifications for freeCodeCamp before enrolling in Flatiron and enjoyed the platform. So rather than going back and rereading Flatiron’s curriculum I went back to freeCodeCamp. I also checked out AppAcademy’s free online curriculum. I chose to be tested on React for my Skilled Assessment. That meant going back and reviewing everything in the curriculum for Javascript and React combined.
What I found by doing these other programs’ versions of learning Javascript and React was that there were holes in Flatiron’s curriculum. Just to be clear, I’m not saying Flatiron’s curriculum was bad or anything. I’m just saying that Flatiron obviously had to squeeze a lot into just a few weeks. What they chose to teach us in that time period is not necessarily what other curriculums decide to focus on. Every program is different. By going through two other JS and React curriculums I got to absorb what each of those groups/programs thought was important as well.
One more thing..
The most important thing to remember is that everyone wants you to succeed. No one wants to sit through an awkward interview while someone bombs. It’s easy to get in our heads and believe that they are just looking for ways for us to fail but that could not be further from the truth. The interviewer is your friend. Listen to what they say, it can hold clues to solving problems.