Five things to do to break through the endless grind of job applications.
No #sadness. No #unemployment.
Getting another 'not enough experience' or 'unfortunately at this time we cannot offer you a role.' sucks. Feels like 👇
I have come across so many good people that have not landed a job because they don’t have the typical background: not from Australia, no local experience, no experience in the interested field, not from a tier 1 Australian university etc. As someone who has hired countless times, THIS DOES NOT MATTER.
Let me share 5 tips you can literally start doing after you finish this article. As a bonus — I have also included the hiring manager’s perspective with each tip.
This will help you get more interview calls, rather than sending cold applications to 100s of opportunities, getting (maybe) one call back and spending 6-12 months in a disappointing cycle of applications and rejections.
Step 1: Up your Technical Skills.
Fill gaps from your undergrad and high school from Code Academy, MIT Open Courseware and Khan Academy. Run your code on replit. Heck some guy made over a US$1,000 per month creating an app on it.
Build with a language that you want to develop in. Sign up to the course on Code Academy or Coursera to learn it. Set yourself a target to complete it in 4 weeks or less.
Sign up to teams that utilise your skills on projects. E.g. go to indiehackers and join a team.
What Hiring Managers look for: There is a focus on hiring people people that understand the fundamentals and not just copy and paste code. Most code you'll write early on is either glue code, bug fixing or unit tests. To do this well, copy-pasting or sourcing directly from online sources will result in code that doesn’t pass tech review, has poor engineering standards or even worse, introduces security flaws in your application! Quality is critical in software, therefore understanding the fundamentals + applying it to various situations is the difference between a senior trusting you to write good code or just being a drag on the entire team.
Step 2: Build a Portfolio.
Find an open source project and contribute. If you are into video games, build a mod or an add-on for your favourite game. Some open source project examples are here, here and here.
Check in your work regularly on GitHub. The evidence that you code regularly should be public on GitHub and not sitting in the c:\projects folder on your laptop.
Find a problem in your life or in your family's life. Build a website or a google collaboration notebook to solve a bit of it. Share it online. TIP: find something that you or your friends do 3-4 times every day or 5-10 times every week. See what you can do to make that 3-5x easier or better with tech.
Enter a hackathon, build a solution. Attempt to scale it to get 100 users on it with the hackathon team. Real life work is not solo, so why should you build your portfolio be? Check out this FB group for upcoming ones in Australia.
What Hiring Managers look for: applying what you know is always more important than knowing theory. This means being able to take functional requirements / use cases / user stories and turn them into technical components / designs / data structures / architectures / events and so on. This also means that you'll be working with your tech lead to integrate segments of your code into different frameworks or shared modules like logging or security. In most cases academic theory doesn't cover this level of complexity. When I hire, I look for this insight because it helps me gauge where you are in your learning journey. The further you are, the easier it becomes to hire you.
Step 3: Look for someone to guide you.
Find someone who is more experienced than you. Ideally 2-3 years ahead from where you are.
Find a coach to keep you accountable. Not a mentor, but a COACH that will push you and guide you at the same time. Like your favourite sports star’s coach. Here is the difference between a coach and a mentor.
What Hiring Managers look for: being coached from an industry person’s perspective will tell you all the requirements that has not been written about in the JD + more. Further, every job has a set of explicit requirements and (often unwritten) stretch requirements. While reviewing applicants, I always remember people that either have a passion for applying their tech skills, or have a deeper appreciation of their role and how they fit into the wider team (great sign your a team player). A lot of these aspects will take time and experience for you to get right, but a coach can help shortcut this journey. Their role is to act in your best interests and accelerate you towards your goals.
Step 4: Build business or non technical knowledge.
Go to meetups, events and attend conferences related to the industry you want to break into.
Read reports from McKinsey, KPMG, Capgemini, Deloitte, and other consultancies on the industry.
Take a trend that applies technology in business (e.g. applying AI in fighting fraud in financial transactions). Study it, map out how it evolved since the 1990s to now. Study hype cycles on Gartner and Forrester. Share your learnings on LinkedIn.
What Hiring Managers look for: understanding the business, its processes and how tech is applied will help you design and build high quality solutions. You will also catch gaps in functional requirements, which is a fast track way to promotions and recognition early on in your career. (It's a large part of how I hit senior consultant in 6 months after joining IBM as a fresh grad). Finally, this is a great way to reach more of the right people on LinkedIn as your viewpoints will be interesting to tech and non tech people alike.
Step 5: Fill gaps in your soft skills.
Sign up to virtual debating or anything that forces you to interact with people. E.g. Improv.
Go out and join meetups. Challenge yourself to talk to three new people every meetup. Warm up by starting conversations with people for the one hour before you go to the meetup.
Attend events at start-up coworking hubs in the city you are in. Go in person if you are able to with COVID. An excellent one in Sydney for example are Pitch nights that occur every second Friday.
What Hiring Managers look for: communication and well functioning teams in a project are critical. Soft skills are even more important in a remote, COVID disrupted world. We always hire for attitude and cultural fit over technical skills.
Since joining the start-up world, I have come across so many good people that have not landed a job because they don’t have the typical background (not from Australia, no local experience, not from a tier 1 Australian university, lack of experience in interested sector etc). As someone who has hired countless times, this does not matter.
This became more apparent when I helped Claire (name changed) score a full time job earlier this year.
Case study: How Claire got a full time job as an Automation Engineer
Claire joined the m8buy team as an intern. She had moved from China to Australia to study her masters. Her English skills and cultural knowledge were okay and she had a CS degree + IT masters from a university I typically did not hire from. So, on paper she did not tick the boxes to get hired by a typical mid-large sized firm.
As the internship progressed, one thing that stood out about Claire was her persistence in trying to understand something (even if she didn't fully understand a topic). She'd research and ask for support when needed, and always aimed to deliver, even under short time frames. She tried to look at what was possible, instead of what she lacked. This attitude was the thing that helped her sharpen her React skills (she had done a bit of work with React earlier, but she had never built new components and website sections from scratch). With some guidance, she learnt how to create unit tests using Storybooks and further rolled up her sleeves when I asked her to work on some APIs with Python.
Post the internship, Claire interviewed at another firm for the role of an automation engineer. The interview to hire process was done in one week and it's now been six months since Claire has been working full-time.
How I supported Claire? I supported her with tips on how to analyse requirements, filling in her gaps with mini coaching sessions. I shared how I do business analysis and allocated time for short lessons on technical skills/code reviews and mentoring (even co-coding at times). The real work and learning was of course done by Claire during normal business hours (and after hours - she said she enjoyed it and wanted to learn!). This is exactly the reason why Claire is now working as a full-time automation engineer.
I have used Claire to illustrate what a good internship can look like - but there have been many others who I have helped land jobs (in the last 5 months) by following the five steps above such as - Armin (experienced in tech with non local work experience, landed a tech lead role), Mei (new to tech and no prior experience, landed a BA/UX role) and Jacintha (no local experience, will be interviewing at a Tier 1 start-up soon). Maybe I’ll do a post about them in the near future too if people are interested in hearing about it.
What does this mean for you?
For starters, focus on the right things that matter for the company size and role type you are breaking into. Small companies value different things to large companies. Contractor roles are again different to perm grad programs.
How do you break through to a paying job in your field + desired role with the right plan for yourself? Use the above tips to help guide you.
I am also happy to guide you and even introduce you to some people from my network. Go here to fill in your details and I’ll be in touch 😊 (Link:https://kirit2.typeform.com/to/mept4ePY)
There is no catch.
The reason I am doing this is my dad went through exactly the problem you are facing when we immigrated to Australia in 1980s. Frankly, I am shocked to discover it's equally difficult to break through today as it was in the 80s. I have been lucky, my parents showed me the way by providing me with an education and life in Australia from a young age.
I know a lot of people who are new to the country or have a different education background or don't have the same guidance. I want to help.
I believe there is a better way to guide smart hardworking people into the jobs they want and the current system is not effective. Our conversations will help me better understand the problems you face so we can create a solution that actually works.
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PS: sign up to my Substack regarding coaching to break into a tech/IT jobs. I will be doing more articles in the coming weeks, particularly around: how to break in as a BA (business analyst) in Australia, how to manage part time jobs and learning on the side, stories of people who came in Australia from overseas as students and have landed successful jobs in the tech field.
About me:
I am a co-founder at a Sydney based startup called m8buy. I spend most of my time validating and building our platform, product and distribution. Prior to this, I ran various teams across 12 years at Capgemini UK, HK and Australia and before this I was at IBM, where I joined as a grad. Since those early days as a grad, I have climbed the corporate ladder to Senior Director and hired, coached, promoted over 150 people personally - people like engineers, architects, BAs, product owners and project managers.
I am sharing the tricks, tips and insider perspectives on what I have learnt in my 20 years in tech across specialist, management and executive roles to help people break through to the tech and IT industry.