Hello DEV community,
I am getting my portfolio and resume ready to begin applying for junior dev jobs. My problem is, what do I put down on my resume? I don't have any professional experience and the only projects I have completed are from Frontendmentor and from Udemy courses. Do I list those under the experience section? And also, what if your projects are not built 100% correctly? I ask because I have some projects where the web pages are displayed differently in different browsers. And should I add my retail experience to my resume along with my degree in Finance?
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Oldest comments (9)
If those projects from Frontendmentor and Udemy were inside of the course. Meaning that the teacher created them and you just followed what they did and recreated it. Then it does not count as your own project and I would most definitely not put that on your resume. Because it is like plagiarism it's not your codebase all you did was copy and paste.
Yes I would add the retail and finance degree because you need to show them some experience that can relate to the role you are applying for. Retail experience could mean you are a people person and know how to communicate well. And the finance means you must be good with numbers which is obviously good for a programmer.
I'm not sure how much experience you have but it might be a good idea to wait until you have a fairly strong portfolio before you apply for junior roles. Because they will compare you half completed broken projects against applicants that have fully working production ready apps and you could get overlooked.
"I'm not sure how much experience you have but it might be a good idea to wait until you have a fairly strong portfolio before you apply for junior roles. Because they will compare you half completed broken projects against applicants that have fully working production ready apps and you could get overlooked."
OMG, yes you have a huge point there. That's why I am still practicing my development skills. I know the competition is fierce even for junior developers. On my portfolio I have my two best projects so far. Every other project is on Github. And of course I'll be working on more.
And as far as Udemy and Frontendmentor projects, I am fully aware about not claiming course projects as my own. But, as far as Frontendmentor goes, they give you the images and guidelines to work with but you have to use your OWN code to design the website. So I rather put that on my portfolio. Even on their website they say it's okay to add their projects to your portfolio.
Thank you so much for replying. This has made me reconsider a lot of things.
Be clever. You want to have a simple site - treat it as a CV, show your skills. Make the programming as clean as possible, my aproach was a very simple white site where I demonstrated my text design skills. That also showed I understood SCSS, critical CSS and treeshaking, ETC.
This is the problem. People are all learning the same material. New ideas are coming out but they are the same ones we batttled with a decade ago just with much larger packets.
I suggest learning deno if you use node and show that. Go white with one secondary color. Make several versions on github sites.
There are so many things that are oldschool and people appreciate because they show understanding rather than the modern - use everybody else's automation.
Make sure to program your CSS youself, but use the preprocesssor of your choice.
Learn the history because as a junior you are likely to be updating a site. Don't think you are a fullstack programmer because you use react and MVC. Take a day to learn Ruby fundamentals and see if it interests you - what's your end goal. AI? UX, SEO, Data scienece? there are a million "fullstack react devs" who have been told that client side rendering is a good thing and to follow the money because that pays their mentors. Be focussed, start simple, and decide what direction you want to focus on.
I hope this helps a bit, if you want me to expand on any point ask away.
I wrote up some advice for writing a resume, the most salient thing being that you should think through the projects you've worked on. Those project skills are always transferrable in the area of knowledge work.
Thank you so much.
I have an article coming up about how I wrote mine. Keep an eye open on Monday.
I moved into tech from a career in publishing! Here's my advice:
Put as much technical experience down as you can. Point to as much content as possible, on dev & github/bitbucket etc, even if its incomplete: it shows you're learning, creating, active, and experimenting; make sure your READMEs are as good as possible since people will be looking at your code. Include any meet ups, hackathons, conferences etc. you've attended, and any coaching or pairing you've done to show you can collaborate with other developers.
Briefly mention previous experience, without giving it too much space - you're a developer now! The exceptions to give space to are transferable skills, & when applying for jobs relevant to your previous expertise (FinTech/retail domains) - but keep it relevant to the developer role.
Don't wait: you'll never be ready, the project will never be 100% (that's the nature of software!) so just apply. Get feedback, iterate on your projects and your resume, and keep applying until you find the right role.
Good luck in your job search!
Wow! Thank you. I never thought about putting meetups on my resume. But I'll definitely do that. As a matter of fact, there's an event with Women who Code this month and I plan on networking and/or applying for jobs. So all these tips are coming in handy right now.
Thank you for the pointers.I was kind of worried about adding my retail and finance background since they're not "related" to tech and didn't know if the skills would be transferable but you made a point there about my willingness to learn. I'll definitely put that on my resume.