What If I Don’t Have Enough Experience — Web Developer

What do I do if I don’t have enough experience what if I’m underqualified for a job well first of all

you should have this mentality in mind when applying to jobs and apply to jobs that you feel you are

under qualified for, if a job is asking you to do something that you already feel confident then you

should ask yourself What am I going to learn in this job.

Am I going to learn actually is this job going to put things on my resume that will make me get better

and get a better position in the future.

Or am I just going to do the same thing that I already know what to do or how to do it?

Finally, you have to keep in mind that job postings are put in order to weed out the weak candidates.

I have seen way too many of these created by non-technical people or just making jobs sound tougher than

it really is to remove junior developers or engineers from applying.

So ask yourself Is this job going to be tough.

Good then.

That is why you want that’s why you should be doing.

Do you feel competent?

You are very qualified for this job.

OK then maybe you should push yourself and apply to a job that’s more difficult than you think.

Every application should be a long shot if you’re applying to something that you’re 100 percent qualified

for.

Where is your room to grow?

So dream big.

But in order to dream big, you might have a bit of a roadblock.

What if you don’t have enough experience.

I don’t love resumes and I don’t think a lot of people do either.

But sometimes without a resume, you cannot get an interview in order to have a good resume.

You need to have something to put on it like a great experience.

Here’s the cash so how can you have a good experience if you’re just getting started.

It’s like you have no hope if you’re a beginner or if you don’t have enough work experience because

you’re just out of school or you’re changing careers.

Well not quite as with everything.

There’s the regular way of doing things.

Then there’s the smart way you see experience doesn’t come just from working at another company.

There are many ways that you can demonstrate experience without a past job.

And here you’ll find my favorite ways to show improvement.

You can get the job done.

You will have to do every single one of them.

But two out of four of these are even better.

Three out of four will be great at showcasing your resume and make you stand up.

So let’s go in order and see how we can do this.

The first one is to get help.

Get help is a great way to demonstrate that you actually code that you’ve built projects.

The number one thing you can do is to start making comments and making sure that you have a good history

of things that you’ve done.

And by the way, if you’re wondering how I got this cat picture in here I’ll show you a little trick in

the next exercise is to make your contribution look a little bit nicer and busier.

In case you’re just getting started and you don’t have a good past history another way to improve your

get high profile or to just add more experience is contributing and participating in open source projects.

For example I’ve created a zero to mastery organization where we have a Hohn of open source projects

by the community that you can contribute to and they’re made specifically for you to mess up make mistakes.

Nobody is going to yell you.

These are just fun projects that are open source they can contribute to and you can do as much or as

little as you want but this will improve your experience and contributing to open source projects and

it’s something you can add to your resumes now contributing to an open source projects.

Recruiters love seeing this because this demonstrates that you can work with others and also with something

like, get hub and version control.

All right let’s look at the next one.

The next salon is a Web site.

If you are especially a full stack or FRONT-END DEVELOPER or even a designer you should have your own

website where you can showcase your skills.

Again is something you can speak about in your interview and about how you built the website or it gives

you a good way to talk about your past projects.

Now you’re asking yourself what Andre am I going to have to build a whole new website and waste a bunch

of time.

Well not really.

Let me show you a couple of tricks you see you don’t need to build your own website from scratch.

There’s a ton of free templates like creative time here that just gives you a nice template for you

to use and fill in with your information we can also look at this one.

And again free templates that you can use.

I especially like the mountain template and you can see that yeah.

I mean you can customize this to your own and make it look professional and it’s already designed nicely

and also customized for different experiences such as mobile tablet and in a day you can have your own

website.

And just to show you how you shouldn’t really spend too much time on your own web site.

One of my favorite people to follow is Kevin Kelly.

He is very very popular among the tech community and just overall really smart thinker.

And you can see his Web site over here.

It’s very simple.

Nothing exaggerated.

A very very clean but small very basic layout.

And this is to show you that you don’t need some crazy animations.

Make it all flashy to stand out as long as you have a personal website.

It just shows that you actually spend time building it and doing something that most people wouldn’t

do.

Another thing that I want to show you is for example the job or that we have for all of my students

and this is again another Oberth sourced project that the community built.

If we just search through let’s say Toronto developers here and we go to Christine a key I hope I’m

saying glossing right.

You can see how simple yet beautiful her portfolio is.

If we go to about me just a nice little bio with links to her profile we go to projects we see some

of their projects.

And this is something that she can put on her resume and immediately stand out from the crowd.

And it also gives her an opportunity to list projects that she can talk about when she gets to an interview.

All right let’s look at the next topic.

One two two big projects now.

You can’t really fake experience if you’ve never built anything beyond a to do list or a Hello World

app.

You simply will not be able to get very good jobs.

However most people think having a hundred projects is the way to go.

So they do a project today and build small projects many small tiny projects to have 30 of them and

they start building all these projects that are very very simple.

Now that’s not actually impressive.

I mean it shows that you’re working hard and coding along.

But if I’m a recruiter you can show me a project of maybe tic tac toe but I don’t really care that’s

something that anybody can build with a bit of coding experience in a day or two.

Frankly no recruiter or interviewer is going to check out all your 30 projects most of the time.

We want to hear your most difficult or the hardest.

Biggest project you’ve worked on instead of spending your time on these small little projects.

Spend your time on one or two big projects for example and other courses that I teach.

We built a face recognition app and this app well has a front end.

Using reactionless a backend where we have a restful API server with Express We’ve deployed to Iraq

we’ve created session management with authenticator routes we store user information such as username

and also hashed passwords securely in our database on postscripts.

We’ve deployed our app with docker and we’ve also used a rattus for session management and caching.

Now all of that may not mean a lot to you but having something like a one big project they can talk

about all these things will make you sound a lot more impressive than somebody that just built a ton

of tiny projects so focus on that have wanted to big projects that you can show off makes you stand

out.

And it’s also going to give you something to talk about during the interview and put it up on your website

or create its own Web site and you immediately can put this as the first item on your resume because

here’s the thing if you don’t have work experience.

If you go back to the resume we used then the exercise.

Remember this resume.

Well if you have no work experience maybe for work experience you can say something like javascript

developer or web application developer and talk about how you build your project here.

Because to a recruiter it doesn’t really matter if you worked at a certain company building an application

or on your own or that could be a little bit Vic too.

They don’t need to know that.

They just need to know that you build things that are real that are big and complicated and you solved

hard problems.

So having one or two big projects they you can list on your experiences is a great way to add to your

resume if you don’t have enough past work experience at companies.

And I have a few students who have actually used this technique to get interviews even though they just

learn how to code.

Six months ago and then finally we have the blog posts or block.

Let’s have a look at what I mean by that.

This is another thing you can include in your resume especially if it’s related to a technology you’re

using or the company is using.

For example I have here my medium profile a medium dotcom allows anybody around the world to just post

a blog post and it’s very popular with the tech community so there’s a lot of tech related posts that

you right on medium and there’s other platforms like this.

What if you wrote a blog post about a specific technology that the company you’re applying for is using

or some sort of a technical problem that they’re facing by doing that and just adding a link to that

block post.

It gives you again another leg up to most people.

And the great thing about platforms like this is that well if we go to one of my articles here you can

post it to what we call publishers and publishers allow your posts to be discovered by others.

And it’s very simple to do.

You can write a blog post on medium in a day and submit it to a place like Hakkar noon and lots of people

see it and as soon as you show this to a recruiter or an interviewer again it automatically shows that

you know what you’re talking about or at least it makes you stand out from the rest and you can do this

with YouTube videos as well.

But I prefer writing because it’s a lot faster and it looks a lot more professional.

So let’s just review here what happens if you don’t have enough experience.

Well all of these four points allow you to gain that experience or show that you have experience without

actually having traditional work experience.

All you need to do is start something on your own and build something like a project or a portfolio

or a blog post.

This only shows initiative but you can focus this project on solely getting your interviews.

Or you can participate in a hackathon or contribute to open source projects by taking this initiative

you’re doing more than most people that hope to just land an interview by sending a generic resume.

You’ll immediately stand out from the crowd and give you something to put on your resume that again

is different than the average developer.

Plus you have the added benefit of something to talk about in your actual interview.

Remember nothing is given to you for free and luck is for those who rather wait and go after what they

want so by simply holding something just for fun such as a side project.

You’re showing how self-motivated and ambitious you are.

Experience doesn’t mean on the job experience.

Write about your portfolio projects.

Maybe talk about your website and how you built it.

Talk about your get high profile maybe a hackathon you participate in and or open source projects you’ve

worked on.

Write a blog post on a specific technology that the company you’re applying to is using all of them.

Answer this question Do you have experience.

Finally there are many things that you can add that are not developer related but can make you a great

employee.

For example did you work as an instructor at a camp.

Well you can now add ability to manage people and communicate well with others.

Any skill that is related to getting the job done can be included.

Also if you have only had six months of coding experience don’t show that on the resume.

That doesn’t mean to lie but to hide that information because a recruiter only glances at your resume

they won’t care if you’re the best of all in the world if they just see six months experience that’s

too risky for them.

Your resume will most likely be discarded no matter how good of a developer you are.

So remember resumes are only good to get your foot in the door by tweaking your resume to show that

you have experience so that the recruiter thinks oh interviewing this person is low risk because they

know what they’re talking about is a good way of doing it.

Do you have past experience having made good decisions in the past and have you worked on a challenging

problem and solve them.

If you’re able to answer yes to that well then a recruiter is most likely going to ask for an interview.