This post is dedicated to all those making that difficult career transition into software development:
1. 🤾♀️ Take action — Continue applying and creating projects to add to your GitHub profile. Your GitHub profile is like the new CV, but a good CV is still really important. A lot of the time I find juniors overthinking, procrastinating or not feeling good enough to apply to perfectly suitable roles. Apply anyway! Action will help you breakthrough some of those mental barriers and imposter syndrome.
2. 📚 Experience over education — I’ve seen several occasions where people make the mistake of thinking they need to keep taking courses and earning certifications to get a job as a junior developer. It’s true you need to be able to demonstrate a certain standard in interviews, but generally interviewers value projects over certificates, experience over education. So that extra project on your GitHub is far more valuable than the next cert — and if it’s a project done to a top industry standard, then it’s worth its weight in gold!
3. 🗣 Communicate well — I’d like to break a myth here, it’s not all about coding in the tech world! Nobody wants to work with a person with an attitude problem, no matter how good at programming they may be. Personality fit is a major criteria in hiring. So in all your interactions with recruiters and potential employers, communicate well. It will take you at least 50% of the way to getting a job in software.
4. 👩💻 Learn your fundamentals — As a starting point it’s fine to learn a framework like React or Express.js, but it’s also easy to hide behind it like a crutch. The deeper your knowledge of the underlying language goes, the more you’ll impress your interviewers. Set some time aside to go deeper.
5. ✅ Stay general but it’s okay to specialise — Often until you join the world of work for real, you may not have a strong preference for the type of work you want to do long-term: front-end, backend, databases or infrastructure/DevOps. If however, you already have a strong preference then lean into it, learn all about it and advertise it! (Just don’t forget to mention you’re going for a Junior position in that more niche field)
💰 Bonus tip: Be flexible but know your boundaries — getting your first role will be a challenge, but after that it tends to get easier. So try to be as flexible as possible with location and salary requirements as there’s a large range out there. Of course it’s fine to have some minimum requirements which you won’t budge on 😜 But always prioritise where you’ll learn more and have a supportive culture of buddies / seniors you can reach out to.
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Top comments (1)
Very useful article for those who are just startng to build a career. I have been in IT for a year now, I tried to develop following advice similar to yours and found a job on this platform ibench.net/ . I think it works)