The main thing I learned in Unit 3 was to think critically about problems I may encounter during my career. In writing my formal report draft, I had to analyze data in order to come up with the best solution to my problem. It was somewhat difficult to come up with these solutions as there are many strategies that one can implement in finding their first job in the tech industry (which is the subject of my report). Of the many people I surveyed and interviewed, almost all of them had different strategies that they thought were best. I had to analyze and interpret my findings in order to find common themes among the responses. I also had to critically analyze which strategies would be effective for my problem statement. For example, the majority of people believed that work experience was the most important factor in getting a job in the tech industry. However, since my report was on getting your first job in the tech industry, focusing on work experience is not a strategy one could employ. Instead, I had to find the majority of responses that would be applicable to my problem statement. As a result, I was able to conclude that focusing on building personal projects that improve your resume and coding skills was the best strategy for finding one’s first tech job.

I also developed my experience of thinking critically about problems during my peer review of my partner’s formal report. I found that while his report had excellence data on how to improve coding education to children school, he did not have a very strong proposed solutions. His main solution to improve coding education was to vote for the NDP in the upcoming provincial election. However, I suggested to him that this was not a very good solution as his main audience was “educators” rather than the general population of BC. I also gave suggestions to alternative solutions that might be more applicable to the data he collected. For example, in the body of his report he had included an image of the relative money spent on coding education between provinces, and pointed out that BC was one of the lowest. I suggested to him that he could use this data to give a specific solution to the problem such as “British Columbia should increase spending on coding education by X amount of dollars.” This example shows how the peer review, along with my other work on the formal report draft in Unit 3, helped me to learn about how to think critically about problems and research data in order to find effective solutions to the problems I will encounter during my career. As such, Unit 3 taught me about some important skills and I look forward to what I will be learning in Unit 4.