How to Get a Developer Job With No Experience Like I Did

Believe it or not, you don’t need a degree or a bootcamp to get your first job

Photo by Monica Sauro on Unsplash

There’s a lot that you can do to improve your chances of getting that first job in tech. Your programming skills are not the end of it.

Without experience, you will need to take steps to convince employers that you deserve a chance. Here’s how I did it.

Intro

I took a nervous sip from my drink as I sat down in the bar with a group of developers. This was the last step in my interview process. To meet the team and see if I’m the right culture fit.

I couldn’t believe I’d gotten that far! I had no experience as a programmer and had only started coding a few months earlier.

I was worried about getting technical questions that would reveal my lack of experience.

To my pleasant surprise, the technical stuff that came up all centered around my GitHub projects. They’d taken a look at what I had there and they were commenting on what they saw. That was comfortable for me, I could talk about these projects.

How did I manage to make it that far in the job search process without previous experience?

So, you are on your way to learning the skills needed to become a developer. It’s important to know that learning your programming language and other related tech is not enough to get a job. You need to make yourself visible for employers and then give them a reason to want to talk to you.

The good news is that there are solid steps that you can take to dramatically improve your chances. You want to start taking care of these as early as possible. So that by the time you are ready to start searching, you already have a good base to build on.

In this article, I want to share with you the cornerstones of what is needed to get a job. We’ll focus on the things that will help you tell a story employers want to engage in.

Resume

Let’s start from the beginning. You need a good resume.

That’s the first thing an employer is going to see. Even though you might not have relevant experience to…