Recently I have been looking at jobs, and all of them require "X Years Experience in Y technology". If you have experience in Z technology (or multiple Z technologies) how can you get into jobs for Y technology? It seems they use this requirements as a filter and you must have this on your resume before they even look at you.
Do you just apply for junior/graduate positions? Or start working in Y technology in spare time and hope its still around after X years.
I see this used a lot as a "filter" in that they hope you see it and don't apply. Depending on what it is and how central it is to the job it might not be that important. If they are asking for 1-2 years, usually what they really mean is they will take anyone but want you to think twice about it first. Job postings are often sort of a "wish list" from the employer, and they end up finding someone that is close to most of those. So don't let one of these things stop you if you meet other requirements and feel you can do the job and can learn the missing stuff fast enough.
If the company is actually worth working for, then it doesn't matter whether your experience is in Y or Z, or any other letter of the alphabet you care to choose. If you have X years experience in problem solving, even if it isn't in the exact technology they want, they should still be interested in you. If not, then perhaps you need to look elsewhere anyway!
In my experience it has been do it in your own time and then find someone that trusts you to let you progress.
I have been very lucky in this with PHP. I was hired for a job that was way above my level, but in the end they allowed me to learn and fail at times and slowly I can do bigger and more complicated tasks.
There are two ways:
I did both of these in turn. I took a contract job to do Access development, but then I got them to let me use .NET for the UI. That got me my first smidgen of on-the-job .NET experience. Then for my next job, I found a .NET place that was willing to hire me based on my three years of Access/VBA, and the smidgen of .NET that I'd already done.
Get around the x years of experience by getting very visible in the community of the Y technology.
If there are some high profile open source projects in Y technology get involved in a big way and get visible in that way.
If people recognize your work in that community and you get to be a speaker or something else which is visible in this technology the years of experience won't matter as much.
Known expert is better then X years of experience.
Also worth trying is try for your work to use technology Y if it's really the best tool for the job.
apply to the job anyway, if they like your resume , they will contact you for an interview.
the other thing that will help you gain attention is contributing to a known opensource project, this will let them see your programming skills and how professional you are.