When do you know you´re ready for a job?

Hello everyone! Is there any sort of guideline as to when someone would be ready to get a job? I´m thinking more about the lines of “if you can do X and Y, you are ready” and the like. Any ideas? Thanks!

There isn’t anything that straightforward, which is part of employers have a hard time figuring out who to hire. Maybe research interview questions for your field of interest and see how well you can answer them?

Whenever you start, expect a lot of rejection and a process that drags on for several months.

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Without a proper education it can be hard. But once you got a decent portfolio and practise for interviews you can apply, I mean at worst you will just get declined.

With education it shouldnt be too hard.

I think it’s really weird how we can live in the same country and have so vastly different experiences of the job market. I have education (engineering physics and electrical engineering) I get consistently turned down for jobs.

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I have a lot of friends in the business so it helps to get opportunities. Go to some meet ups and talk to people.

I have been to the meetups there are. The people there only work for corporations that only hire juniors with 3 years of experience.

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Given your username, this advice might be a bit discouraging, but there is a simple answer:

If you have to ask, then you are not ready.

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Oh, I can answer most of the questions I´ve found with ease. My biggest fear, I guess, is not being able to deliver. Plus, most jobs I´ve seen demand experience which I don´t have.

I have never had all of the “required experience” for a job I’ve been offered.

The basic answer is your never ready, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to go out and get jobs.

There’s no such thing as “knowing enough”, or knowing everything for that matter. As such you should keep learning, even once you get the job.

If during a job interview you fall flat, find out why and look to improve yourself. But you generally wont know what you need todo unless you seek it out.
Part of the learning process is knowing what you don’t know. The best way to find that out is to put yourself in situations you want to be able to handle.

Goodluck, keep seeking out that knowledge and pushing yourself. :smile:

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Don’t be put off by job adverts. Companies generally list their whole stack, but most coders will focus on back or front end. If a company is open to employing a junior developer (the salary is the best indication of this) then they definitely won’t expect you to work the full stack - or be an expert.

Remember also that the demand for good developers exceeds the supply, and that your best assets as a newbie are enthusiasm, experience of recent tech, and willingness to learn.

Finally, to bridge the gap between a student and a junior dev, I highly recommend learning as much as you can about Git, Jira and Agile.

You need 3 main things:

1/ A portfolio where you show that you can use state-of-the-art technologies at least at the basic level. That means: html, css, javascript ES6, a framework (react, angular or vue). If you know more things, that is a plus. In your portfolio, you don’t need huge projects. If you have small widgets done with a framework and you can explain the code to another programmer, you’re fine. You need a github account and you need to use it. If someone looks at your github, they’ll see that you’ve been doing commits for the past months, which shows that you’re not just making it all up.

2/ Either work experience or studies. You should include in your CV whatever courses or certificates you have that show that you’ve been studying. They don’t need to be official certificates. Saying that you’ve been studying the curriculum of freecodecamp shows your interest in learning by yourself, which is a very good thing.

3/ You need to know coding, duh, the more you know the better. You always get a technical interview, where if you don’t know basic stuff, you fall. I suggest you try to learn well javascript ES6 and whatever framework you decide to use. You should understand how a framework works not only in regard of syntax and execution, but also conceptually. Freecodecamp provides you with basic knowledge about react, although I suggest you also read the documentation carefully. And the more you know about javascript the better, I recommend javascript.info. If you read and understand it all, you’ll end up knowing a great deal. The javascript part here in freecodecamp is also very good and it teaches ES6 from the start, although it’s lacking in regards to the DOM API (at least the module 2).

With these 3 things you should be ready

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