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America needs certified craft professionals with technical skills who can keep it growing. Finding a career in construction is a life-changing decision to fulfill important roles in building communities. BYF helps in discovering how construction can be a good fit for your future — from making the right preparations to finding training. Construction Career Match

What’s Your Trade?

The construction industry is full of opportunity with an extensive range of trades to work in. Want to find out which construction craft career would be perfect for you? Take the craft pro quiz!

Architect

Architects design new buildings and create the plans used to construct them. Learn More

Carpenter

Carpenters build frameworks and structures by cutting and shaping wood and other construction materials. Learn More

Concrete Finisher

Concrete finishers build foundations, floors, walls, roads and other structures that are made using concrete. Learn More

Electrician

Electricians install and maintain the electrical and power systems in new and existing structures. Learn More

Heavy Equipment Operator

Heavy equipment operators control large machinery that move materials at a construction site. Learn More

HVAC Technician

HVAC Technicians install and maintain the heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems that maintain temperature and air quality. Learn More

Mason

Masons use bricks, blocks and stones to construct walls, structural supports and even decorative surfaces. Learn More

Plumber

Plumbers install and maintain the pipes and valves that make up a building’s water and drainage systems. Learn More

Project Manager

Project managers are construction site leaders who plan, coordinate, budget and supervise projects from development to completion. Learn More

Welder

Welders fuse materials and objects together by applying heat or pressure. Learn More

Make a Living Out of a Career that Builds Futures

“I was able to contribute to the building of a power plant that’s going to provide energy for thousands and thousands of people.” —Temika Gibson, Electrician

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A simple framework for shifting your life and creating your future

— Are you standing in the ‘What’s next?’ doorway? Are you wondering what you should do with your life? So often we pull back from these pivotal moments unprepared to execute a plan — not because we don’t want to change, but simply because we just don’t have a plan. What you’re looking for is a new vision for yourself—one that will ignite your spirit, fueled by the energy within your heart — a new vision that will transform your life into a new reality. Here’s the good news: Believe it or not, you’re in the right place at the right time for change. Here are 6 ways to step forward to create a compelling vision for your future:

1. Slow Down

All too often we focus on reacting to what’s going on around us — the phone, the car, the job, the continuous pressing noise that surrounds our daily life. Stop. Hang it all up for a little while. Put aside time for yourself, to heal and adjust to your surroundings, to set a course for your future. Take some real time for yourself to just be by yourself for a little while, free from all the distractions in your life. Sit and think about what you want your life to be like and what you want it to represent.

2. Clear Your Mind

Find a quiet place to be alone with your thoughts, to really spend some time with your inner self. Take some deep diaphragmatic breaths in and out. Feel the air passing your lips while you clear your mind. When you arrive at a clear, open space in your mind, what do you hear? What is your inner voice saying to you? What’s really important to you, what are you really passionate about, what are you great at? What is your true purpose in life?

3. Think Big

Now is not the time to hold back; now is the time to let go. Think about what you are capable of and reach for the maximum outcome. If you aim high, your successes will be monumental. If you shoot too low, who cares, right? Take this time to dream about the possibilities and what you can do if you put your heart and soul into it. Truly step outside the norm and think about what you could accomplish if you bring your full self to it. Really let go and dream about the possibilities for a while.

4. Get Focused

Once you have a clear idea of what’s important to you and what you’re capable of, it is time to focus on what that really looks like. See your vision for yourself in full detail, as if it were already completed. Imagine every single angle of this vision. Feel what it would be like to embody this image. Clarity is key; you must completely know what your vision will look like from front to back, side to side, inside and out.

5. Believe in Yourself

Your spirit lies in your belief in ‘what if’ and the possibilities of what you are capable of accomplishing. When you find yourself on the edge of self-doubt, stop and say: “Yes, I can do this. This is really who I am and who I am about to become!” Accept nothing less than your personal best for yourself and take things one step at a time. Small steps lead to giant leaps over time. Remember a time when you experienced success. Hold those thoughts and feelings close to your heart, and remember that you can do it. You’ve succeeded before and this time there’s no stopping you.

6. Take Action

Once you’ve developed your vision, you must take a step towards it in order to start the process of change. If not, you’re just leaving another idea left to wash away and be forgotten. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming — just a small step to symbolize the beginning of this next journey in your life. Prove to yourself that you are committed to making this a reality by serving yourself a taste of your future. Remember, this is only the beginning. Time is ticking off right in front of you. What you do with your time shapes your destiny, so make every day count. Where you focus your heart is who you really are and what you will leave behind. What you do with your spirit will light up your soul forever. What you see with your vision is how you will live today and how decisions will be made for tomorrow. Visualize your future as rewarding and exciting, and recognize that your personal best is available to you right now. Be the true you and live the adventure of a lifetime — your lifetime, your vision! The author’s book, The Victory Cycle You may also enjoy 10 Steps to Directing Your Energy to Achieve Anything by Elinor Cohen by Michael Tombor

“Instead of saying “I don’t have time” try saying “It’s not a priority,” and see how that feels.” — Laura Vanderkam

Changing careers is very difficult. Add in a full-time job and a couple of kids and the task seems nearly impossible. Yet, even if you are busy, you can prioritize and make the time to focus on what matters to you and build the skills to level up your career.

Engineer your future with code

I started my coding journey just six months ago. Now I am one project away from completing my front-end developer certificate on freeCodeCamp. I’ve also completed the web developer boot camp course by Colt Steele on Udemy. And I did this all while raising two kids and working in a full-time job. When I began using these tips, I saw my progress increase tenfold. I know I would have accomplished much more if I had implemented them earlier in my journey. I have not only benefited from increased productivity, but I feel more balanced and am having more fun than ever before.

My pivot into web development

After being in health care for the last five years, I realized that it wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Don’t get me wrong — I loved helping people on their path to health, but I hated seeing the system break down for them. I hated when people could not afford their medication, or when their care plan wasn’t in sync with the treatment they needed. I wanted to do more to help these people. But I knew that I couldn’t do more unless I took a step back and looked at the bigger picture. I was not always interested in coding, but the more I looked at the forces making real change in today’s world, the more I saw that tech was behind these advances. I saw an opportunity to make meaningful change, and that is when I became interested in coding.

Why are you coding?

Whatever the reason is, really think about it and pin it down. Use it as motivation to propel you towards your coding goals. Having this end goal will help you bust through plateaus and push through the hard parts (coding is hard). Every day that I spend at my current day job motivates me to get home, boot up my laptop, and continue my journey of learning how to code. The good news is that building coding skills is simple. All you have to do is code a lot. But unfortunately, this is where the hard part comes in. Fitting time into your busy life to routinely code is difficult, to say the least.

How to climb the coding mountain

There is a gap between where you are now and where you want to be. That is why you are reading this article. That is why you work day in and out, and end up sacrificing time with your family and loved ones. If we are spending all this time working towards our goal, it is paramount to make the most of the time we spend learning how to code. Here are five steps to turn this dream into a reality:

1. Create your personalized goals

To make the most of your time, nothing is more important than making actionable short-term goals. This will not only help you feel a sense of accomplishment every time you meet a goal, but it will help make the coding journey feel a lot less daunting. Goals Exercise! To help you come up with focused goals, I want to encourage you to do a quick exercise that I picked up from Laura Vanderkam. 1. Picture yourself one year from now. You have crushed ALL your coding goals and landed your dream job. You have given five talks at conferences around the world, and you built up your App and it was successful. Whatever success looks like to you, picture your future self. Please be ambitious, maybe even dream a little. 2. What 3 — 5 goals did you accomplish in that year that made it so successful? 3. Write these goals down. 4. Repeat this exercise for your personal life goals. It is impossible to work all the time, and to be successful you need work life balance (or you will burn out). Now you have 6 — 10 ambitious goals that you want to accomplish during the next year. To break these larger goals down into action items, think about and plan about how you can meet these goals. For example, if you want to complete the freeCodeCamp front end certificate, you need to schedule time to work on it throughout the week. If you want to run a marathon, you need to buy running shoes, sign up for a marathon, and schedule time to train regularly. 2. Make a Schedule I’ll be honest — I am definitely not the scheduling type. I thought that I could wing it day by day. But realistically, you need to set time aside to focus, or your goals will pour over into the rest of your life. I found myself feeling anxious about coding during time with my family or when I was putting my kids to bed, because I hadn’t coded yet that day. The thing I looked forward to all day (coding) started to negatively impact my quality of life. Splitting your time into focused blocks allows you to be 100% in the present moment. When it is coding time, you can have tunnel vision and hack away. When it is time to unwind, or hang out with people you care about, you can be present because you coded that morning, or have time scheduled later in the day. Here is an example of my personal schedule: As you can see, I schedule a lot of family time. Family is really important to me. Your schedule will look a lot different, but the point is to create a schedule that will allow you to meet your goals without you hating life along the way. Just try to account for everything, so you can stick to your schedule. 3. Audit yourself to find time opportunities Write down all the activities in a given day or week and see what you really do with your time. You will likely be surprised by exactly how much time you spend mindlessly scrolling through your Instagram feed, or binge watching a new Netflix show (I love Stranger Things). I’m not telling you to cut all of it out but keep a balance. You can definitely turn some of that idle time into some serious coding gains. There is more time than you think If you are still thinking to yourself, “yeah, but I still work a lot and (insert excuse here) so I can’t find time”, then here is a fun fact! There are 168 hours in a week. If you work a full 40 hour week and subtract 8 hours of sleep per night (which I definitely don’t get) you still end up with 72 hours of “free” time. Look at all the time you have in your life situation and squeeze as much “good” stuff into that time as you can. There IS time. 4. Fill your time with quality Here are some tools that I use to help me accomplish my coding goals and stay focused on my learning path: freeCodeCamp Seriously one of the best tools for meeting goals. The curriculum is right there for you to follow and work on, it even tracks your progress! JavaScript 30 30 JavaScript projects really help you master array methods while filling up your portfolio with projects (plus it is tons of fun). Wes Bos is a solid instructor who provides a quality free course. You can complete it in 30 consecutive days, or work it into your learning schedule. 100 Days of code on Twitter This 100 day challenge consists of coding every day and tweeting about what you did. It is a great tool for tracking progress and measuring how far you have come. This community is full of inspiring people from all over the world and is a great way to meet like minded developers. The Web Developer Boot Camp I am almost finished with this course, and it has patched a lot of holes in my coding knowledge. Colt doesn’t just show you how to do something, he also explains why you do it a certain way. Plus, there is now an advanced web developer boot camp that I am going to take once I’m done. Live It! This isn’t a resource, but you should embrace the tech community by living it. Listen to podcasts while you drive to work or do the dishes. Follow leaders in the industry on Twitter. Read articles. Immerse yourself in tech and you will learn without realizing you are learning. 5. Multiply your time We have set goals, and now have several larger goals broken down into actionable goals. We have gone through how to fit these goals into your busy life and I have helped give you some ideas on how to fill your time. Now, I want to tell you how you can make the most out of the time you put into coding. The Answer: Be Happy! What does being happy have to do with managing time, you ask? Simply put: it is everything. The idea is called multiplying your time. Being present and deeply focused leads to increased productivity. This in turn multiplies the time you spend by increasing efficiency. Plus, who doesn’t want to be happy? According to Shawn Achor, who studied the effects of happiness and its link to productivity, your brain performs 31% more productively when you feel happy. Dopamine, which floods into your system when you feel positive, does two things:

1. It makes you happier (duh!)
2. It turns on the learning centers in your brain. They help you learn things more easily, and allow you to spend less time on learning while retaining more information.

Turn your brain into a dopamine producing machine! You can release more dopamine by creating lasting, positive change. There are five things you can work into your routine to turn your brain into a dopamine producing machine: 1. Write three new things that you’re grateful for each day. This creates the habit of scanning the world for positive things, instead of negative ones. 2. Journal about a positive experience you had in the last 24 hours. This allows you to relive the positive experience which leads to the same dopamine response. 3. Exercise. Go on a short walk before a coding session, or bust out a quick workout. Exercise releases tons of dopamine. 4. Meditate. Meditation trains your brain to focus more on the task at hand, all while releasing dopamine. 5. Random acts of kindness. Thank someone in your social support network for helping you, or help someone out. This not only releases dopamine for you, it also does the same for the person you helped (and they may pay it forward).

Use blocks of time to build your future

Even if we are busy, we must take out time for the things that matter the most. When you focus on what matters, you can build the life you want with the blocks of time you have. Thank you for reading this post! You can find me on twitter @michaeltombor Learn to code for free. freeCodeCamp’s open source curriculum has helped more than 40,000 people get jobs as developers. Get started canva.com user-edited photo During your 20’s you are at an age where you are emerging adulthood and figuring out your blueprint of life. You now have the responsibilities and the decision-making skills of an adult. You are now as well able to take chances and opportunities as you launch your career which will help build your future. Though as a young adult, you are also in a stage where you experience periods of uncertainty and anxiety during which you would question your goals, plans, and even the relationships that you have. Having said that, you might have questioned if you were going on the right path to achieve your dreams, but you do not have to worry much about it, as it is never too late in your age, and neither do you have much time to waste as you are only beginning to build your life and your future. If you haven’t yet figured out what you are going to do in your life as a professional especially when you’re in your 20’s where you weren’t completely sure of the paths that you are going to take, then consider doing these 8 tips and help these guide you towards your path to success and build a wonderful future in the decades to come. canva.com user-free photo

1. Identify Your Passion —

During your early 20’s, find out what your natural talents are, the skills and the strengths that you already have, and be able to start utilizing them on a day-to-day basis. Find your passion and follow it, because once you “do the things that you loved, you will never work a day in your life” which means that you will never become tired of the work that you do because if you don’t have passion for a career that you chose to pursue, it will only lead to quitting and doing other things instead. If you are in your late 20’s and haven’t figured out your identity and what you want out of a career, it is never too late to do so. Try to explore different opportunities and gain skills that will be relevant to your career.

2. Learn and develop your skills/talents —

Once you identify the skills or the talents that you are good at, learn things that will help you develop them and would let you advance in your career. Keep on practicing and become better at the talents or skills that you have as it is helpful for your future growth.

3. Improve Communication Skills —

start working on your communication skills as this will help boost your confidence level and help you connect with others easily. Start by Improving the way you convey your message clearly so others would not be confused and you won’t be misunderstood. Be an engaged listener which means talking less and listening more. Stop talking often about yourself as it will only appear that you were arrogant to others.

4. Connect with others —

Try to make a great first impression on the people that you will meet in your life. Build relationships and connections with those people who have achieved some success in life and learn from them. Be open to how others handle their mistakes and learn from their experiences, especially those who are senior to you.

5. Having an Optimistic Attitude —

Develop a positive mental attitude in your daily living. No matter how hard the situation you are going through today, face it with optimism, because you will only let yourself down, unable to move forward if you let yourself stuck with the negative mindset that you have in your mind. Instead, think of it as a way to let you grow and become a better version of yourself.

6. Being Disciplined —

Self Discipline will help you to stay on the right track of what you are doing no matter the hardships that comes your way just because you are focused on achieving your goals. Set good habits and remove the bad habits in your life that are only holding you down. Good habits include healthy eating, keeping fit physically, and taking care of the emotional aspects of one’s self.

7. Being Consistent —

Consistency is the key to achieving your goals, if you are consistent in working hard towards your goals and your passion in life, you will absolutely achieve success constantly. Do not let Self-Doubt creep in and allow yourself to be confident no matter what the outcome is. Of course, you will get tired and you will stumble, but don’t let this happen for a long time as it will become a habit. Allow yourself to rest for a while without thinking of giving up and stay on track as much as possible.

8. Work in an organized manner —

cultivate healthy habits that will help you to stay organized. Being organized will save you from the stress and hassles that work and general life would bring, from planning and deciding things, to ditching the unnecessary things in the areas of your life that do not even matter. It will help you to stay more focused on your goals and less on the cluttered aspects of life that will only mess with your plan. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you miss our previous articles, you can read it by clicking on these links below;

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