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 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 what you should be doing.
Do you feel confident you are very qualified for this job.
Okay, 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% 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?
See, 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.
And in order to have a good resume, you need to have something to put on it.
Like great experience.
Here's the cash.
So how can you have 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 and prove you can get the job done.
You won't have to do every single one of them, but two out of four of these, or even better, three
out of four will be great at showcasing on your resume and make you stand up.
So let's go in order and see how we can do this.
The first one is GitHub.
GitHub 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 commits 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 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 GitHub 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 ton 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's going to yell at you.
These are just fun projects that are open source that you can contribute to and you can do as much or
as little as you want.
But this will improve your experience in contributing to open source projects, and it's something you
can add to your resumes now contributing to open source projects.
Recruiters love seeing this because this demonstrates you can work with others and also with something
like GitHub and version control.
All right.
Let's look at the next one.
The next one is website.
If you're especially a full stack or a front end developer or even a designer, you should have your
own website where you can showcase your skills.
This 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, Oh, 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 is a ton of free templates like Creative Tim 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 website, one of my favorite
people to follow is Kevin Kelly.
He is very, very popular among the tech community and is just an overall really smart thinker.
And you can see his website over here.
It's very simple.
Nothing exaggerated, 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 board that we have for all of my students.
And this is, again, another open source project that the community built.
If we just search through, let's say, Toronto developers here and we go to Christine.
I hope I'm saying the last name.
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.
If 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.
1 to 2 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 100 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 and you show me a project of maybe tic tac toe, well, that's 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, in other courses that I teach, we built a face recognition app and this app, well it
has a front end using reaches a back end where we have a restful API server with EXPRESS.
We've deployed it to Heroku, we've created session management with authenticated routes.
We store user information such as username and also hashed passwords securely in our database on post.
Chris We've deployed our app with Docker and we've also used Redis for session management and caching.
Now all of that may not mean a lot to you, but having something like a one big project that you can
talk about, all these things will make you sound a lot more impressive than somebody that just builds
a ton of tiny projects.
So focus on that.
Have 1 to 2 big projects that you can show off, makes you stand out.
And it also going to give you something to talk about during the interview and put it up on your website
or create its own website 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 we go back to the resume we used in the exercise, remember this
resume?
Well, if you had 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 vague, 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 heart problems.
So having one or two big projects that 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 blog.
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 and medium.com 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 can write 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
blog 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 post 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 Hacker 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 than go after what they want.
So by simply building something just for fun, such as a side project, you're showing how self motivated
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 GitHub profile, maybe a hackathon you participated in, 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 developer 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 recruiters 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 you for an
interview.
I'll see you in the next video.