‫What do I do if I don't have enough experience?
‫What if I'm underqualified for a job?
‫Well, first of all, you should have this mentality mind when applying to jobs and apply to jobs that
‫you feel you are under qualified for.
‫If a job is asking you to do something that you already feel confident, then you should ask yourself,
‫What am I going to learn in this job?
‫Am I going to learn?
‫Actually, is this job going to put things on my resume that will make me get better and get a better
‫position in the future?
‫Or am I just going to do the same thing that I already know what to do or how to do it?
‫Finally, you have to keep in mind that job postings are put in order to weed out the weak candidates.
‫I have seen way too many of these created by non technical people or just making jobs sound tougher
‫than it really is to remove junior developers or engineers from applying.
‫So ask yourself, is this job going to be tough?
‫Good.
‫Then that is why you want.
‫That's what you should be doing.
‫Do you feel confident you are very qualified for this job.
‫Okay, then maybe you should push yourself and apply to a job that's more difficult than you think.
‫Every application should be a long shot.
‫If you're applying to something that you're 100% qualified for.
‫Where is your room to grow?
‫So dream big.
‫But in order to dream big, you might have a bit of a roadblock.
‫What if you don't have enough experience?
‫See, I don't love resumes and I don't think a lot of people do either.
‫But sometimes without a resume, you cannot get an interview.
‫And in order to have a good resume, you need to have something to put on it.
‫Like great experience.
‫Here's the cash.
‫So how can you have good experience if you're just getting started?
‫It's like you have no hope if you're a beginner or if you don't have enough work experience because
‫you're just out of school or you're changing careers.
‫Well, not quite.
‫As with everything, there's the regular way of doing things.
‫Then there's the smart way.
‫You see, experience doesn't come just from working at another company.
‫There are many ways that you can demonstrate experience without a past job.
‫And here you'll find my favorite ways to show and prove you can get the job done.
‫You won't have to do every single one of them, but two out of four of these, or even better, three
‫out of four will be great at showcasing on your resume and make you stand up.
‫So let's go in order and see how we can do this.
‫The first one is GitHub.
‫GitHub is a great way to demonstrate that you actually code that you've built projects.
‫The number one thing you can do is to start making commits and making sure that you have a good history
‫of things that you've done.
‫And by the way, if you're wondering how I got this cat picture in here, I'll show you a little trick
‫in the next exercise to make your contribution look a little bit nicer and busier in case you're just
‫getting started and you don't have a good past history.
‫Another way to improve your GitHub profile or to just add more experience is contributing and participating
‫in open source projects.
‫For example, I've created a Zero to Mastery organization where we have a ton of open source projects
‫by the community that you can contribute to.
‫And they're made specifically for you to mess up, make mistakes.
‫Nobody's going to yell at you.
‫These are just fun projects that are open source that you can contribute to and you can do as much or
‫as little as you want.
‫But this will improve your experience in contributing to open source projects, and it's something you
‫can add to your resumes now contributing to open source projects.
‫Recruiters love seeing this because this demonstrates you can work with others and also with something
‫like GitHub and version control.
‫All right.
‫Let's look at the next one.
‫The next one is website.
‫If you're especially a full stack or a front end developer or even a designer, you should have your
‫own website where you can showcase your skills.
‫This again, is something you can speak about in your interview and about how you built the website,
‫or it gives you a good way to talk about your past projects.
‫Now you're asking yourself, Oh, Andre, am I going to have to build a whole new website and waste
‫a bunch of time?
‫Well, not really.
‫Let me show you a couple of tricks.
‫You see, you don't need to build your own website from scratch.
‫There is a ton of free templates like Creative Tim here that just gives you a nice template for you
‫to use and fill in with your information.
‫We can also look at this one and again, free templates that you can use.
‫I especially like the mountain template and you can see that.
‫Yeah, I mean you can customize this to your own and make it look professional and it's already designed
‫nicely and also customized for different experiences such as mobile tablet.
‫And in a day you can have your own website.
‫And just to show you how you shouldn't really spend too much time on your own website, one of my favorite
‫people to follow is Kevin Kelly.
‫He is very, very popular among the tech community and is just an overall really smart thinker.
‫And you can see his website over here.
‫It's very simple.
‫Nothing exaggerated, very, very clean, but small, very basic layout.
‫And this is to show you that you don't need some crazy animations.
‫Make it all flashy to stand out.
‫As long as you have a personal website.
‫It just shows that you actually spend time building it and doing something that most people wouldn't
‫do.
‫Another thing that I want to show you is, for example, the job board that we have for all of my students.
‫And this is, again, another open source project that the community built.
‫If we just search through, let's say, Toronto developers here and we go to Christine.
‫I hope I'm saying the last name.
‫Right.
‫You can see how simple yet beautiful her portfolio is.
‫If we go to About Me, just a nice little bio with links to her profile.
‫If we go to projects, we see some of their projects and this is something that she can put on her resume
‫and immediately stand out from the crowd.
‫And it also gives her an opportunity to list projects that she can talk about when she gets to an interview.
‫All right.
‫Let's look at the next topic.
‫1 to 2 big projects.
‫Now you can't really fake experience if you've never built anything beyond a to do list or a Hello World
‫app.
‫You simply will not be able to get very good jobs.
‫However, most people think having 100 projects is the way to go.
‫So they do a project today and build small projects, many small, tiny projects to have 30 of them.
‫And they start building all these projects that are very, very simple.
‫Now, that's not actually impressive.
‫I mean, it shows that you're working hard and coding along.
‫But if I'm a recruiter and you show me a project of maybe tic tac toe, well, that's I don't really
‫care.
‫That's something that anybody can build with a bit of coding experience in a day or two.
‫Frankly, no recruiter or interviewer is going to check out all your 30 projects.
‫Most of the time we want to hear your most difficult or the hardest, biggest project you've worked
‫on.
‫Instead of spending your time on these small little projects, spend your time on one or two big projects.
‫For example, in other courses that I teach, we built a face recognition app and this app, well it
‫has a front end using reaches a back end where we have a restful API server with EXPRESS.
‫We've deployed it to Heroku, we've created session management with authenticated routes.
‫We store user information such as username and also hashed passwords securely in our database on post.
‫Chris We've deployed our app with Docker and we've also used Redis for session management and caching.
‫Now all of that may not mean a lot to you, but having something like a one big project that you can
‫talk about, all these things will make you sound a lot more impressive than somebody that just builds
‫a ton of tiny projects.
‫So focus on that.
‫Have 1 to 2 big projects that you can show off, makes you stand out.
‫And it also going to give you something to talk about during the interview and put it up on your website
‫or create its own website and you immediately can put this as the first item on your resume.
‫Because here's the thing.
‫If you don't have work experience, if we go back to the resume we used in the exercise, remember this
‫resume?
‫Well, if you had no work experience.
‫Maybe for work experience.
‫You can say something like JavaScript developer or web application developer and talk about how you
‫build your project here.
‫Because to a recruiter, it doesn't really matter if you worked at a certain company building an application
‫or on your own, or that could be a little bit vague, too.
‫They don't need to know that.
‫They just need to know that you build things that are real, that are big and complicated, and you
‫solved heart problems.
‫So having one or two big projects that you can list on your experiences is a great way to add to your
‫resume.
‫If you don't have enough past work experience at companies.
‫And I have a few students who have actually used this technique to get interviews, even though they
‫just learn how to code six months ago.
‫And then finally we have the blog posts or blog.
‫Let's have a look at what I mean by that.
‫This is another thing you can include in your resume.
‫Especially if it's related to a technology you're using or the company is using.
‫For example, I have here my medium profile and medium.com allows anybody around the world to just post
‫a blog post, and it's very popular with the tech community.
‫So there's a lot of tech related posts that you can write on Medium and there's other platforms like
‫this.
‫What if you wrote a blog post about a specific technology that the company you're applying for is using?
‫Or some sort of a technical problem that they're facing by doing that and just adding a link to that
‫blog post, it gives you, again, another leg up to most people.
‫And the great thing about platforms like this is that, well, if we go to one of my articles here,
‫you can post it to what we call publishers and publishers allow your post to be discovered by others.
‫And it's very simple to do.
‫You can write a blog post on Medium in a day and submit it to a place like Hacker Noon.
‫And lots of people see it.
‫And as soon as you show this to a recruiter or an interviewer, again, it automatically shows that
‫you know what you're talking about, or at least it makes you stand out from the rest.
‫And you can do this with YouTube videos as well.
‫But I prefer writing because it's a lot faster and it looks a lot more professional.
‫So let's just review here.
‫What happens if you don't have enough experience?
‫Well, all of these four points allow you to gain that experience or show that you have experience without
‫actually having traditional work experience.
‫All you need to do is start something on your own and build something like a project or a portfolio
‫or a blog post.
‫This only shows initiative, but you can focus this project on solely getting your interviews, or you
‫can participate in a hackathon or contribute to open source projects.
‫By taking this initiative, you're doing more than most people that hope to just land an interview by
‫sending a generic resume.
‫You'll immediately stand out from the crowd and give you something to put on your resume.
‫That, again, is different than the average developer.
‫Plus you have the added benefit of something to talk about in your actual interview.
‫Remember, nothing is given to you for free.
‫And luck is for those who rather wait than go after what they want.
‫So by simply building something just for fun, such as a side project, you're showing how self motivated
‫ambitious you are.
‫Experience doesn't mean on the job experience.
‫Write about your portfolio projects, maybe talk about your website and how you built it.
‫Talk about your GitHub profile, maybe a hackathon you participated in, or open source projects you've
‫worked on.
‫Write a blog post on a specific technology that the company you're applying to is using.
‫All of them answer this question.
‫Do you have experience?
‫Finally, there are many things that you can add that are not developer related but can make you a great
‫employee.
‫For example, did you work as an instructor at a camp?
‫Well, you can now add ability to manage people and communicate well with others.
‫Any skill that is related to getting the job done can be included.
‫Also, if you have only had six months of coding experience, don't show that on the resume.
‫That doesn't mean to lie, but to hide that information.
‫Because a recruiter only glances at your resume.
‫They won't care if you're the best developer in the world.
‫If they just see six months experience, that's too risky for them.
‫Your resume will most likely be discarded no matter how good of a developer you are.
‫So remember, resumes are only good to get your foot in the door by tweaking your resume to show that
‫you have experience so that the recruiters thinks, Oh, interviewing this person is low risk because
‫they know what they're talking about is a good way of doing it.
‫Do you have past experience having made good decisions in the past and have you worked on a challenging
‫problem and solve them?
‫If you're able to answer yes to that, well then a recruiter is most likely going to ask you for an
‫interview.
‫I'll see you in the next video.