Breaking Into Tech

The Struggle

The hardest part about breaking into tech is getting your first professional experience. Once you have your first professional job, it gets easier over time. The job itself is going to be difficult, but you’ll figure out how to do it and, through help from your coworkers and multiple hours of studying, you’ll do it, but the hardest part is getting your foot in the door.

The Importance of Experience and Projects

You see what you have on your piece of paper. In this case, it's your resume. Work experience and projects really go a long way to forming who you are. Like experience and projects honestly are the most important things on your resume, recruiters won’t look at your resume for more than 6, maybe 7 seconds. Make sure to find the main sticking point on your resume that can sell you as a person well.

Building a Strong Project

I recommend you work on a nice big large project, like a project with a database, frontend, backend and a good design.

It’s a good way of showing that you know what you're doing. That would be really great on a resume if you don't have experience.

Getting Your First Experience

Honestly, I recommend taking what you can. I started off with an unpaid internship back when I was in college.

You need something to hit the ground. Make sure people look at you. In the short term, it’s a learning experience for you, great for your resume and, in the long term, it could lead to your first full-time job. From that, you can do so much.

Networking and Putting Yourself Out There

Make sure, outside of your project and experience, there are other ways that you can improve yourself other than just your resume.

For example, going to coding meetups, and meeting other people in general.

You can also just go on LinkedIn and start connecting with some people that you would like to be. Maybe a developer at Amazon, or Meta, or Airbnb, or whatever it may be.

Just put yourself out there and make sure you can connect with them and talk to them.

The more connections you have, the more eyes you'll get, and the higher chance of maybe something working out.

Expanding Your Knowledge

Never stop learning. Try to expand your knowledge as much as you can.

Try to think of it like you're trying to look at the whole picture. For you to look at the whole picture, you need to keep stepping back.

The only way you can keep stepping back is with more and more knowledge you get. Let's step back and look at this other part of the picture.

And then step back and look at the other part of the picture. You want as much understanding of it as possible.

Final Thoughts

I know it's really rough out there to get a job in tech nowadays. Keep trying. Keep going. It might take some time, it may even take a lot of time. Your future self will take you for it just keep going.

Tech is really an amazing field, it has a lot of perks and benefits but it’s super competitive and hard to really break into but you have to write your own success story, keep going you will make it.