What to Do Next After Completing a Programming Course?

So what do you do next after completing your first programming course? Let's talk about that today.

This is all about what to do after you've completed some training. So perhaps you've taken your first programming course, you've completed it, and you feel good. You've got some basic skills under your belt. What do you do next?

Well the answer to that depends on you largely. What do you wanna do with your life after that first course? So you've probably taken, I'm guessing at this point, if you've just taken one course, an Introduction to Programming course or you picked up a course like my Java Masterclass or whatever it was, some ebook and you've got some basic skills. So the question to ask yourself at this point is, how do you feel about programming?

Are you still as enthusiastic and motivated to learn programming as you were when you started? And perhaps if you've done that, you've got time. You've got more of an idea of where you wanna go. For example, when you start a course, you might be really fixated on say, becoming a games developer. So you might have actually started this training with the intention of becoming a games developer. But you'll find, and this is quite common in the industry as you progress and learn some skills, that you'll learn a little bit about different technologies, for example building desktop applications or creating web applications or whatever it is. You might find that your interests will change. And whereas you were interested, say in game programming, you might be looking more at web development.

So importantly, ask yourself at the end of that course, how do I feel about programming and if your focus, where you're looking at, has changed. And if it has, then maybe you can start looking at courses relating to that technology. But if it was a games development course and you took a programming language course to learn the basics, of course, the next logical step would be to find a programming course that you can focus on skills relating to games programming, in that particular example.

So have a think about where you're trying to go with your skills. And you can start focusing on where you wanna go. If you're looking for general programming skills, in other words, you just wanna become a better programmer and you're not necessarily at the stage where you wanna specialise in anything or perhaps you haven't decided, then a great idea is to look at things like algorithm courses, design patterns, data structures, those sort of fundamental concepts that are usually not taught in detail in a beginning course. So keep in mind with programming courses, there's no one course that can teach you everything about programming. They can teach you a lot. And you can certainly get a good overview of a lot.

But it's going to take a lot of training to become an expert and become a really good developer. So what you can do is focus on specifics of the programming language. So whereas in a basic course, you might learn the basics of a programming language, start perhaps looking at another course that focuses on algorithms or data structures or design patterns, those sort of common things that are used in the industry and apply to virtually all areas, like game programming, desktop applications, web development, whatever it is.

So good generic, good general programming skills are very valuable. So that can also be an excellent way to focus on your future skills. All right, thanks for reading and I hope you got a lot out of this blog post. You've made it to the end! If you've got any questions, feel free to leave a comment and I'll get back to you.