Hello everyone, just wanted to get some input about a career outlook and any first steps you would suggest for someone learning to code from this site. For a little background, I graduated from college with a degree in political science in May of 2018 and immediately began a year-long term as an AmeriCorps VISTA with a food bank. After that ended in May of ‘19, I’ve had a couple different jobs but nothing that really worked out or paid me enough to move out of my parents’ place. On the suggestion of one of my friends who is doing pretty well for herself working for Amazon as a software engineer, I started thinking about some way to get a skill and a job where I apply it (those are basically her words, she wasn’t necessarily suggesting coding) and I decided that learning to code would be a good place to start because I can learn it for free and I have a lot of time to do it what with being unemployed. I really like that it involves some form of creativity and problem-solving, as well as following a set of rules of how to accomplish things. I really like having a balance of those elements in what I do. In any case, I am almost done with the Responsive Web Design certification, just a couple more projects to complete. I was planning on doing the JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures certification next.
Hoping for some ideas about how I can jump into a career once I’m done with these certifications, any other advice on what I should learn, how to look for a job, etc. I’ve seen some job postings for instructors at non-profits that teach coding to people and that really appeals to me, but usually require a year of experience as an engineer.
Thanks in advance.
To be honest, the Responsive Web Design and JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures sections just… aren’t that much. They give you the foundation that you need, but unless you are spending a fair amount of time outside of freeCodeCamp building some more impressive projects, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a lot of trouble finding a job.
@ArielLeslie Thanks for letting me know. What do you think I should do to build other projects? Just do things on my own? Try to find some sort of internship? Take classes?
Keep working at it. Keep learning more (do more of freeCodeCamp if it’s working well for you). Build projects and work on the good ones until you think they’re professional quality. If you find good classes or an internship, great (but don’t take an unpaid internship).
People do successfully get jobs after teaching themselves for free online, but it’s not a quick and easy journey. This is skilled work and people usually study for 1-2 years before being job ready.
I recommend you to: build small projects, then build a full website like a ecommerce website for example.
Then go to network events such as meetup and show your code.
This is how I did, here is the website I have built: https://github.com/NielsDom/ecommerce-react