Landing a Tech Job is About What You Do Outside of Class
Tags: career
Published: 2020-08-21 19:56:35

Landing a tech job is not always an easy, immediate process. Being in that position myself provided me so many challenges that I picked up a few *lessons learned* along the way. 

I’ve been lucky enough to have the experience of getting hired, being a mentor / coach to over a hundred students in landing their tech career. I became obsessed to seek out the "*success formula*" that I also sought out the advice from many other hiring experts and successfully hired folks.

In working and studying so many people, I've found many repeating trends on what worked and the biggest ones had nothing to do with their boot camp or degree. Sure, they learned the fundamentals there but it was **they did outside of the classroom with those fundamentals that actually resulted in getting their first tech job**. 

Here's a short list to get you started.

## 1) ABC: Always Be Coding

It's rare that anyone will come out of a boot camp with a 100% working full stack application, deployed waiting for thousands of users to try out. Use that as the perfect playground to test and integrate new features and build your passion project.

A source of what to code or learn next is *job listings*. I love reading through job descriptions to find out what technologies they're using. Find your ideal software job posting, see what they're looking for, and use that as guidance to what to learn next.

**Example**: I found a Rails job I liked and they used Redis and Sidekiq. That was never covered in my boot camp, but they are some of the most common things you add to any production app. What better way to stand out and improve relative skills than by spinning up an app with those two integrated properly!

Another way to make this habit of Always Be Coding stick is to commit to [#100DaysOfCode](https://www.100daysofcode.com). 

## 2) Make a Wow-ing Portfolio

If someone approached you with your perfect dream job **at this very moment**, ready to hire you right now, but needed to see good working samples of your apps to know if you are qualified for the job, would you have something to show? Sadly, for a lot of people I talk to, the answer is *no*.

If you're looking for a job (or even freelance projects; something else we can talk about in the future), but have nowhere to direct people to learn more about who you are or the type of work you do, create one. Make a personal website / portfolio that *wows*, one that demonstrates what you can bring to the table on day 1 of the job and become a productive team member. Here's a chance to practice your **ABCs of Always Be Coding** too.

*Side Note: before we go any further, if you do not have a personalized domain of your name, go get it. It'll cost around $10 a year, but it may come in handy in the future. I like [Namecheap](https://www.namecheap.com) (always check for their [promo codes](https://www.namecheap.com/promos)) and hear a lot of good things about [Hover](https://www.hover.com) too.*

## 3) Being At the Right Place At the Right Time

If you're not putting yourself in places where hiring managers, recruiters, job decision makers, and other engineers are at, then you're putting yourself at a disadvantage. Obviously, in person face to face, meetups are not much of an option at the moment, but plenty of remote, virtual meetings have popped up. I run my own personal ones and another favorite has been [Virtual Coffee](http://virtualcoffee.io). 

Another easy place to start is finding your local area developer groups. Just Google away or ask any local developer friends if they know of any Slack or Discord groups. And of course there's LinkedIn (you do have a LinkedIn, right?). I won't spend too much time here since it can go at length, but at the minimum, you should get on LinkedIn as a way to seek job opportunities out there. 

## 4) Bonus (*highly suggested*): Share Your Learnings and Journey

I can't count the number of people I've helped and interviewed who have been hired from just their blog / online web presence alone. Think about it. A large part of the hiring process is a good culture fit, arguably just as much if not more than your technical skills and experience. Being a helping hand or showing your interest in learning and coding can show your personality in seconds to get you noticed!

Yes, doing these can be weird and uncomfortable. But I guarantee you that it's **all in your head**! The sooner you break and grow from that, the sooner you can make great relationships while creating many opportunities for yourself.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/tubdshks51y5xszsm9by.png)

So, there it is! The ones who landed their tech jobs were the ones who took this feedback and ran with it, not sitting, waiting for the “perfect” time (because it never comes). The goal is to be **proactive in your job search, not reactive**.

To keep this short, I didn't fully elaborate on those points as much as I normally do (possible future content to come if needed!). But if you have other points to add to help others, enjoyed this, took anything away, think it's garbage, want to see more content like this, please let me know!

You can find me on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/TheKevinTruong) or start a convo with me on LinkedIn [here](https://www.linkedin.com/in/thekevintruong/).