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General Discussion

Lee Preslan
Lee Preslan
79 Points
Posted by Lee Preslan
Lee Preslan
79 Points

Seeking Employment Advice Upon Completion of FSJS Techdegree Program.

I was born, raised and currently live in Cleveland, Ohio. I have 6-7 years of work experience in the IT field as a Technical Application Support Analyst for a software company but would like to become a Web Developer. I just enrolled in the FSJS Techdegree program. Upon completion, I will actively seek out employment. Web Development job openings are few and far between in Cleveland and the Northeast Ohio area. I rarely see any Junior Developer job listings but I always see a ton of job listing for Senior Level Developers. Might anyone have advice and/or suggestions on what I might do about my situation? Thank you.

1 Answer

Robert Manolis
STAFF
Robert Manolis
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Robert Manolis
Robert Manolis
Treehouse Guest Teacher

Hey Lee, Great question! And welcome to the Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree. :)

The best thing any new developer can do to break into this industry is to do as much as possible to thoroughly demonstrate both their technical skills and those all important soft skills. Make sure your online presence is all dialed in. Professional user names. Clean social media. A top notch LinkedIn profile with a growing collection of connections, and some endorsements. A GitHub account showing daily commit activity for months on end, and several projects in repos with great README files and professional looking code, meaning it's clean and well organized and consistently indented and nicely commented. It doesn't have to be the best, most efficient code ever, but if it's easy to read and understand, it will please hiring managers. Fine tune your resume and references. And then get your name out there by writing some blogs and contributing to open source projects. All these things are helpful because they demonstrate a nice history of hard work and commitment, and that's exactly the sort of thing that can go a long way towards impressing hiring managers, especially for junior developers who don't have a lot of relevant work history.

As far as there not being a lot of junior opportunities in your area, there really isn't an easy solution for that. There are a lot of opportunities in this industry to work remotely, but they tend to seem more geared towards more experienced developers. If relocation is an option, that's definitely worth looking into, even if it was just a temporary relocation for a couple years or so to really get your foot in the door someplace. Something like that could maybe turn into a remote position after you've proven yourself.

If you are just beginning in the Techdegree, perhaps the best immediate advice I could give you would be to join your Slack team, and make the very most of it. That community will be an excellent place to get advice on these exact issues, as many your Techdegree teammates will be going through similar things and having similar experiences.

And here's a couple links that I think you will find helpful.

https://teamtreehouse.com/library/job-search-help https://medium.com/team-treehouse/how-to-get-your-first-job-in-tech-7478a51fc78

Best of luck, Lee. See you in Slack! :)