Whether you’ve decided on a web development career via the traditional degree route or by home learning – both avenues will leave you needing more experience to secure that first web development job.
Often the skills you’ve learnt during uni or college aren’t actually that relevant to the world of work and someone with a bit of commercial experience and no formal education will almost always get the job over a graduate with none.
“You need enthusiasm and passion for the world of web development, a huge desire to keep learning and good experience!”
We find that all companies who hire web developers are asking for the same key things at pretty much all levels – enthusiasm and passion for the world of web development, a huge desire to keep learning and good experience!
So it’s a bit of a catch 22, how do you get the experience without a job?! If you ask anyone in the industry I’m sure you’ll get pretty varied advice, I’ve heard all kinds of tips and tricks from developers and expectations from clients when they are hiring someone junior, but the suggestions below seem to be the most helpful when searching for that first development job.
Keep learning
Home learning websites are a great way to keep your skills fresh and up to date:
- Codecademy – really popular and incredibly completely free!
- Codeschool – more in depth than Codecademy and focussed on 4 main languages
- Treehouse – more project orientated than Codeschool so it’s great if you want to learn to code for a particular idea
You should also follow industry trends with blogs and online tutorials like Smashing Magazine or CSS Tricks.
Advertise what you do
Set up your own domain with an email address – this is much more relevant than using Hotmail or your uni email account and shows you mean business.
“My main tip would be to go in with a portfolio, explain your process, how you create things, how you develop, what issues you came across, how you overcame them and what you would improve on”
It’s a really good idea to build a portfolio to impress potential employers with as many examples of your work as possible, you can use projects from uni or your own web creations. Whilst writing this I’ve asked a few of the junior developers I know for their tips and a portfolio has been the big thing every single time.
For example, developer Ben Brehaut told me: “My main tip would be to go in with a portfolio, explain your process, how you create things, how you develop, what issues you came across, how you overcame them and what you would improve on. This shows the employer that you put a lot of effort in to your work and how you will improve next time!”
If you aren’t ready to do paid freelance work you can offer to maintain, revamp or even completely build websites for friends or relatives for free to start with, then you can move on to paid work developing sites for small local businesses to expand your portfolio even more.
Get active on Github – being able to use Git as version control will really will make you stand out against your competition as it’s rarely taught at university. Use Stackoverflow – it helps you learn new skills and shows what you already know by the questions you’ve answered.
Another good idea is to blog about what you are doing. As long as your opinions aren’t really offensive it will help to show possible employers your thought process, the reasoning behind your decisions and how much you really know about tech!
Get out there
Get in touch with local web agencies to ask to do short term internships – this should give you great references when you are applying for something more permanent.
You also need to start networking – either with social media or face to face at developer meetups (there are plenty all over the country covering pretty much everything – check out the TechSPARK event calendar for upcoming South West events). You’ll get to learn more about technology from experienced developers and you could even get to meet hiring managers in an informal, relaxed environment.
So whichever way you do it, examples of your skills and experience really seem to be the key – be it your own website portfolio or a busy Github account, prospective employers will always want to see what you are capable of before they even think about meeting you.
Image credit: Neourban Hipster Office by markus spiske.
