Total of 6 years (my fault), graduated with honors. Can’t get a job because I don’t have experience. Countless applications out. Zero interviews.
Just lie. There used to be a subreddit of people who would provide professional references, and half of the employers never bother to check references anyway. Send LinkedIn connection requests to everybody’s aunt and uncle, because hiring managers subconsciously prefer candidates that are just a few degrees of separation away. Your professors, their spouses, their coworkers who live on the opposite side of the country.
We live in a post-truth reality. Roll with it.
you ain’t wrong baby, except no no with that Linkedin shit. Everybody hates getting spammed. Linkedin is the way to advertise that you are a tool.
Use your hobbies and class projects as experience. Don’t oversell your abilities; just lie about where you learned shit.
Can attest, don’t claim you have mad skills with Excel, when you just know how to sort and do some formulas and such. Even if you get that job, it will crush your soul
“I have made Excel skills.”
“So you’re good at Excel?”
“No. I am skilled at being angry at Excel.”
I’m in a similar situation. Do employers believe that the workforce will never run out of people who have experience if employers never bother to provide and cultivate newbies to start getting experience? Right now, it’s like you can’t get in the club if you haven’t already been in the club. And how are jobs that are labeled as Entry Level requiring applicants to have 5+ years of experience?
And how are jobs that are labeled as Entry Level requiring applicants to have 5+ years of experience?
This is a deliberate psychological ploy by businesses. They’re expecting prospective hires to feel that they’re “lucky” for being considered despite meeting the obviously bogus job requirements in the hopes that they will be desperate enough if hired to accept insultingly low wages for the position.
This is where internships during school help. You gain experience when your employer has few expectations of you. Even my first degree (2 year Associates) required a one semester internship as a degree requirement.
What did you go to college for? My buddy got his power engineering and then couldn’t find a job.
BS Cybersecurity. A topic I’m actually interested in. 🥲
That’s my field. Yeah, it can be hard to get your foot in the door, but once you’re in, you’re in. The nice thing is that all the info and experience you need is freely available. Want to show off malware analysis skills? Download a sample, tear it apart, write up your thoughts, and post it in a blog. Link to it in your resume. I’m a hiring manager, and I read those. Is network analysis more your thing? Malware-traffic-analysis.net. Know what we need? People who know what the three major cloud providers’ security logs look like and know when something actually bad is happening, because the default alerts are pretty useless. Same for O365 logs. Sometimes, I feel like our userbase wants to get their accounts compromised.
- Get GitHub pro (4$/mo) and do two or three side projects. Try to space out commits so you have a little activity every day or so instead of a few big ones. Add a nice readme for your account.
- Update your resume. Use an online service, or ideally, run multiple drafts by some sort of career advisor at your school. It should be short, clear, and include a side projects section. Put your GitHub URL in it too.
- Clean and update your LinkedIn. It’s a shit website, but managers, HR, and c-suite people use it a lot. Make sure you have a nice headshot- it doesn’t have to be professional, but nice.
- Make a list of companies you’re interested in, find them on LinkedIn and connect with everyone you can from them. Prioritize management, HR, and company founders (for startups).
- Tell everyone you’re looking for work. The people you connect with on LinkedIn, friends, family, whatever. Be personable, somewhat funny, and don’t act desperate.
- NOW apply for positions at the companies you’ve got on your short list. Apply to every position you think you’re a fit for, give it a few weeks, and then apply to everything you might be able to figure out given some time. If you’ve had friendly interactions with people through LinkedIn, tell them you applied to a position at their company.
- Practice interviewing, but don’t feel like you have to be smooth and charismatic. Feel free to go off on nerd-tangents about related tech that you’re interested in. Most of the people interviewing you don’t have the expertise to tell if you actually know what you’re doing, so the way they identify good tech people is through stereotypes. If you act a little autistic or geeky, they’ll eat it up (most of the time).
Good luck.
Start out doing helpdesk. The job sucks and so does the pay, but it’s a foot in the door and where most IT people I know started out (including me)
Can’t agree more. Managers normally want to see “professional” work experience. College, courses, certifications only get you so far. Working a year or two as a help desk technician will really push your career forward.
There’s also the aspect of the managerial “I had to do it so why should you get to skip to the middle” attitude, which isn’t fair but is reality
Do you have any certifications? Keep an eye out for which ones you keep seeing in job postings and work towards any that you don’t already have.
