How can I improve my prospects for getting my first development job?

Question

I'm having a hard time trying to get my first developer job. I am self taught in PHP and Objective-C/Cocoa. I know that I am more than capable to do basic PHP development work, but I seem unable to convince people of my ability. Employment agencies only look at my CV, and are un-impressed due to the lack of paid experience. Most employment agencies seem to lack IT specific knowledge which makes it much harder to discuss my position with them. I'm certain that if I was able to converse with developers in a position to employ me that I would make a good impression.

How can I improve my employment prospects? My ideas so far:

• Get the Zend PHP Certificate. If I have a qualification this will help get agencies to notice me.

• Unpaid work experience - Approach local web dev. agencies and ask if I can spend a month working for them. Any tips of how to do this?

I'm at a loose end and starting to lose hope. I know that I'm a good developer and just want an opportunity to prove myself.

Answer 1

Get yourself some demonstrable experience to show an employer a) you're serious about your career and b) you have enthusiasm. Once you have that, approach employers directly, be creative in how you search for jobs. You're spot on about agencies - most are idiots with little or no computing knowledge and they scan for keywords. If you don't match their keywords you haven't much hope.

Answer 2

As developer, you can also look at small scale (probably able to finish in 1-2 months) freelancing. With that kind of experience, you will be able to add and fill your resume quite a bit. What's more, after finishing these freelancing jobs and when you get interviewed, you are able to show the complete project to your interviewer.

Answer 3

Create a nice-looking personal site / blog, describe in about section that you built it manually then put it on your CV. Will be like the first item in your portfolio.

You may try in parallel looking for some free / cheap freelancing assignments, maybe something at the uni. This might bring you completed projects to show off. One of the freelancing assignments may potentially turn into a permanent job offer.

Regarding employment agencies, it is a waste of time. Most of them can only perform a basic operation like matching the requested skill set to that of a candidate. They usually know nothing of software development field, and they are definitely not those who may recognize a potential and give you a chance. A few that called me throughout the years were not even able to read computer-related acronyms aloud correctly, so I had to educate them.

Answer 4

You could get involved with an open source project, which could help to show off your programming skills.

Volunteer work (Unpaid work experience) will also help.

Answer 5

check this blog post from 37Signals: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1748-forget-the-resume-kill-on-the-cover-letter

and then look at their Gold Standard: http://thinkcage.com/svn/

Answer 6

Two stories:

I got into programming by starting out with a low-level sysadmin job with a small company. It was an easy step from there to programming within that company and then onto other programming jobs. Just take the initiative and start scripting or creating small utilities to make life easier for your co-workers. If you can do this well its not hard to ask your boss for a reference stating your job involved some programming tasks.

I now work as a consultant and recently hired someone because they authored a Wordpress plugin that I wanted modified. I didnt care one bit about their previous experience because it was clear from their plugin code that they knew what they were doing.

There are many avenues for getting a development job, but it all comes down to writing some code and making sure someone can see it in action.

Answer 7

Get the book "I.T. WARS: Managing the Business-Technology Weave in the New Millennium." Google "IT WARS" - you've got to also focus on the non-technical elements, such as business and people, discipline, responsibility and accountability. Check it out - it helped me and I've never looked back.

Answer 8

I'd recommend you keep doing what you are doing. Definitely apply direct to employers when you can, even if it is speculatively, rather than going through agencies. It shows initiative, plus agency candidates require an agency fee is paid, which could be enough to tip a potential employer towards you rather than someone else if you don't come with that.

In the Bristol area, its worth following this mailing list:

http://www.under-score.org.uk/pipermail/underscore/

too - lots of people post jobs or work requests there.