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De Malong
De Malong

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A question on how to gain the experience needed for job entry.

I started my coding journey in September 2020 and during that period, I have learned enough to consider applying for jobs, but most of the jobs entries requires a minimum of three(3) years experience which I don’t have. How do I proceed to land a job.

Top comments (6)

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dastasoft profile image
dastasoft

The entry point is hard but I think the best thing to do is to put together a portfolio showing the skills you want to demonstrate, don't think too much about making perfect projects with 100% quality and all the features you can imagine, people interviewing you will most likely prefer a finished project.

The portfolio idea is mainly because a lot of people do bootcamps and tutorials nowadays but personally I find it more interesting what you have done with that knowledge on your own than if you have done that tutorial, bootcamp, or CS.

Also consider contributing to an open source project to test and learn team skills and get some real experience.

Good luck!

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moose profile image
moose

Experience is a gate-keeper requirement from HR and usually not from the department themselves though they tend to believe pedigree == competence.

Go to github and become a contributor to an open source project
Pick out a small task and write about the experience and document the steps you took to do it as subject matter and post it here.

Go that do develop some basic groundline that you understand what you are doing and then just apply and show case the work you're doing and invite the potential employer to read your articles .

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de_malong profile image
De Malong

That sounds interesting, thanks for the advice will definitely check out some repos and see if I can get projects that I liked and try to contribute

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fjones profile image
FJones

It varies from firm to firm, but often experience requirements are heavily-inflated. And: There's still a relative shortage of developers. Building up some references is useful of course, but I would recommend not getting discouraged by the requirements. Embellish your CV if needed to get past HR, but at the end of the day a lot of recruitment processes end up setting you up for a practical test anyway.

Internships are rare (and often require degrees instead), so prefer Open Source contributions or portfolio projects. On the latter, though, my personal advice is: don't do what everyone else is doing, and don't put too much work into it. I don't care about yet another ToDo-List Webapp, and I don't need to see a startup-ready scheduling tool either. Show me that you understand the basics and can bring something to a working state. Fixing things in detail and marketing it is not what I'm looking for when I want to hire someone.

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christosmito profile image
christosmito

I think you should build a couple of projects and demonstrate them through your portfolio, it;'s a good start. And do not stop applying.

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de_malong profile image
De Malong

Thank you for info, been building a few clones websites now, it’s even a great learning experience