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 job 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.
Okay then maybe you should push yourself and apply to a job that's more difficult than you think.
Every application should be a longshot.
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.
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 resumé 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 improve.
You can get the job done.
You will have to do every single one of them but two out of four of these or even better three out of
four will be greatest showcasing on your resumé and make you stand up.
So let's go in order and see how we can do this.
The first one is get HUB Get hub 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 get hub profile or to just
add more experience is contributing and participating in open social 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 gonna 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 resume is now contributing to 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 one is Web site.
If you especially a full stack or a front end developer or even a designer you should have your own
Web site 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 Andre.
Am I going to have to build a whole new Web site 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 Web site from scratch.
There's 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
Web site 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.
He is just the overall really smart thinker and you can see his Web site 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 or that we have four 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 a key I hope I'm
saying the last thing 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
other projects and this is something that she can put on her resumé 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 to two big projects now.
You can't really fake experience if you've never built anything beyond a to do list although 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 this shows that you're working hard and coding along.
But if I'm a recruiter and 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 interview 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 reaction yes a back end where we have a restful API server with Express
we've deployed it to Roku we've created session management with authenticated routes.
We store user information such as user name and also hashed passwords securely in our database on post.
Chris we've deployed our app with Docker and we've also used readies 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 two 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.
Put it up on your Web site 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 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 that 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 too 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
resumé.
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 post 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 they 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 hoped 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
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 GitHub 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 or in the world if they just see six months experience that's
too risky for them.
Your resumé will most likely be discarded no matter how good of a developer you are.
So remember resume is 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.