Go After Your Goals and Dreams; A Message of Hope By – Richard Itimi, Mixed Reality Expert At Microsoft.

Richard Itimi’s job demands that he spend hours at a time working and creating cool gadgets such as the hololens. He works in the Mixed Reality: Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality space. Itimi, of Delta State, Nigeria, has the job title of Software Engineer at Microsoft Nigeria and is also proud to take on the label of a husband of one and father of one one-year-old son.

Itimi went to secondary school at King’s College and pursued Tertiary education at Obafemi Awolowo University where he studied Computer Engineering. He describes his time in the university as “where his interest was baked into a more refined product” and ultimately led him down the path of what he’s currently doing. 

Itimi’s rise and rise is expected no surprise owing to his trait as a self-starter which is a great trait for a software engineer to have.

“I just need to lay my hands on the resources I need and boom I’m off to doing stuff,” he said. Another factor that comes to play in terms of his career growth is that he gets and stays thoroughly prepared for opportunities. “Because certain opportunities came at certain times and I was prepared for it. I’m glad that has afforded me the opportunity to work with some of the best companies in Africa and the world: BBC, Interswitch, and then Microsoft. What stood me out is always trying to be prepared for every opportunity. When the opportunity comes, I’m ready to take it.”

The list of things that motivates Itimi keeps growing as the years go by. Some of the things that have made their way to the list include his family background as the first university graduate in his paternal family line and his desire to make the most of that precious opportunity, his financial responsibilities to his wife and children. He is also motivated in his career by his exigency to create solutions that alleviate problems and make life easier to be in for people. 

As endless as the possibilities that exist in tech so also is the extent Itimi aims to grow, learn and evolve. He hopes to use the tool of tech to make people feel good and live better.

Though he works in a space that’s creating the future, if he ever comes in contact with tech that’ll blast him to the past, he’ll use it to tell his younger self to be more confident as he recognizes that his shyness when he was younger may have cost him some opportunities.

“Now I understand that even if my voice is shaky, I should always speak my mind,”

Skills that should be valued by the younger generation according to him are Communication Skills and Emotional Intelligence. On the latter, he said, “You should learn to listen to other people. Learn to read in between comments. You should look at their level of understanding. You should be empathetic, to understand where they’re coming from.  A lot of times when people speak, it is not literal. There’s something underneath that fuels whatever they are saying and the onus is on you to connect to that thing.”

In respect to hard skills, Itimi believes that “basic computer skill is a necessity, you need to be able to find your way around a computer. You don’t need to be an expert, but we’re in an age where that set skill is not set aside for a particular group of people. They’re now basic skills no matter the industry you’re in”.

Another non-negotiable in terms of hard skill that should be at the fingertip of every person for Itimi is Coding. He went on to dispel a myth surrounding coding in these words, “To be honest a lot of times when people hear coding, they think it is one scary, big thing. It’s just another language of communication, it’s a language you use to communicate to the computer and so if you can learn to speak English and other languages, you can definitely learn to code, no matter how little.”

For those that will be exploring a career in tech, he encourages that they have a debuggers mindset that inquires and inspects to get to the root cause of problems else they’ll get easily flustered at every bug block. Having a “never-say-die” spirit has personally gotten him through those seasons. “I know there’s a solution to this, computers don’t have a mind of their own yet. It is the instruction that I’ve given to the computer that I’ve made messed up somewhere and I know if I check it, I’m going to fix it, and having that mindset will help you go a long way,” he says.

“To be honest a lot of times when people hear coding, they think it is one scary, big thing. It’s just another language of communication, it’s a language you use to communicate to the computer and so if you can learn to speak English and other languages, you can definitely learn to code, no matter how little.”

As someone that has lived in Nigeria all his life, his vision for Nigeria is that it becomes a place that fulfills potential. “I know Nigeria is really blessed, and Nigerians are really hard-working people and we just need the right conditions.” He is saddened by the current brain drain of minds that should be in the country to move it to a better phase. Itimi concluded with the level of education in children within the country to be worrisome. “There’s a large number of children that are uneducated and I believe that if we can get those numbers up in terms of educating the population, poverty will reduce and we will have better systems and processes in government and in the private sector as well.”