How do you gain experience?

My LinkedIn feed is full of posts regarding junior developers and how hard it is to get experience when you are just starting out. I’ve noticed 3 different kinds of company when it comes to hiring junior developers.


✅ Companies that hire junior developers and offer training and mentoring in order to help them progress.


❌ Companies that don’t hire any junior developers.


💩Companies that want to pay a junior developer salary but expect you to have a CV which reads like a senior developer with 10 years experience.


The type of company you’re most likely to come across will depend on which part of the world you live in but recently I’ve seen a few concerning posts from recruiters in the UK; less junior developer positions are being advertised than in the past. Possibly a lot less.


So how do you gain commercial experience if you are just starting out? There is only one answer to this and that is to make yourself as valuable as possible…so valuable that it makes more financial sense to hire you than to not. 


My own advice for anyone starting out is to build something that interests you, containerize it with Docker, and push it to a cloud computing service such as AWS / Google Cloud. 


This will be where the most useful learning and the most valuable experience comes from and this is where your value as a developer will increase a lot. A lot of people get stuck in the loop of just doing course after course (or half a course after half a course).


I’d also recommend contributing to other people’s projects because software development is a team game. In my most recent YouTube projects, I’ve encouraged viewers to contribute code and I’ve supported the ones who have. This is something which I will continue to do and something which I’d support you in if you wanted to get involved.


I’m here to help you.


Let’s put it this way. If I was interviewing someone who had some nice projects on their Github profile and maybe an open source contribution, I’d be far more interested in them than someone who just waved their certificates at me.

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