In this series, I will be using the term “competitive” to introduce you to my own practical methods and give you an early start on your IT career over other students.
-> Chinese Version HERE 中文版戳这里 <-
As a student, have you ever wondered about the following:
- How can I get work experience during my degree? Where to find a part-time dev job during the study?
- How important is my academic GPA/WAM for landing a job?
- Is it difficult to apply for a graduate position?
- What should I do in a career expo?
- How do I write a proper resume? Person A tells me blah blah blah, and Person B tells me blah blah blah, who should I listen to?
- etc…
In this series, I will be answering the above questions. Hopefully, you will be more confident about your career development and have a better idea on how to sharpen your “competitive edge” after reading my articles.
About me:
I have been working as a part-time developer since my 1st year in university.
I have worked at Accenture, Ernst & Young, and ANZ Bank during my entire 4 years of Bachelors of CS degree.
Do I have a secret for finding these part-time positions during uni?
Yes :)
I’ve discovered many hidden secrets and shortcuts behind our IT industry for us junior devs, and I have consolidated them into what I call “Golden Rules”.
Let’s begin:
Rule 1: Everything is a Tradeoff
This is by far the most fundamental rule in my system.
When applying for a position, you are essentially trading your skills for $$. Depending on how valuable your skills and experiences are, your disadvantages could be re-considered by the employer.
Such “disadvantages” could be:
- don’t have a permanent visa (i.e. international student)
- an ongoing student in his/her XX year
- lack of work experience in the IT industry
- lack of industry connections
In most cases, each of these disadvantages will have its own “weight” within an employer’s system and can be overcome by your advantages. (E.g. programming skills, IT knowledge and project experiences)
Rule 2: There’s a way to Bypass the Standard Hiring Process
Yes, you didn’t hear me wrong.
In our modern-day society, especially in the IT industry, you don’t always need a degree to land a dev job, and more companies are changing their recruitment policies to accept those without a university degree. (e.g. Google / Apple)
However, this is not the case for most of the companies if you do a search online…
As painful as it sounds, most of the companies’ hiring policies are still stubborn, they require the applicants to have finished their degree or be in their final years.
If you look up for a student job on LinkedIn/Indeed/Seek, you will immediately notice that the number of part-time/casual/intern positions are much much less than what you might expect, and even these open positions are highly competitive as every student like you would apply for them.
But what did I say earlier?
There’s a way to bypass a company’s standard hiring process.
It might not apply for every single company, the chance of success greatly depending on your skills, connections, and the season of the year (no kidding)
For those of you who can’t wait to read, here come two tricks:
Skill-based
- You, as a student, apply for a fulltime permanent position on LinkedIn/Indeed/Seek/Etc…
- When the recruiter calls you, explain to them that you can only work part-time.
- Now at this moment, it’s basically Rule #1, the recruiter will hopefully talk to the dev teams. They will take your abilities and experiences on one side, your disadvantages on the other side, and reconsider whether the tradeoff is worth it. If everything goes well, you will be told that they will have a part-time opportunity for you.
- Bingo, Achievement Unlocked. ☺ You’ve just discovered a hidden position out of the job market!
The reason this approach works is because if the recruiter contacts you, that usually means your skills and experiences are already a good fit for the company.
Now let’s consider:
- A company has part-time roles that aren’t open to the public.
- A company doesn’t have part-time roles but is comfortable opening up one just for your skills and experience (but maybe lower pay).
The two outcomes above are ideal.
However, a company could also be really strict about part-time roles, or are just not flexible enough to offer you one. In this case, it’s unfortunate…
Just move on and keep applying to the next one :)
The timing is crucial, it will likely fail if you are applying towards the end of the year, as it’s the off-season for hiring. Recruiters are most active during start-mid of the year. However, that shouldn’t stop you from applying for positions, but it’s good to know. :)
Connection-based
- Attend IT events that interest you, talk to people and make friends. Keep an eye on your university IT societies.
- There are often people and/or company events that could get you hired. You never know who you are talking to at these meetups and he/she could be the manager looking for people like you ☺.
- The truth is, there are a lot of positions hidden from those online job platforms, and those positions are only available to internal employees or to their 2nd/3rd connections.
- Don’t know where to find more industry events? You can get an awesome app called Meetup, which allows you to search for industry events and attend them (mostly for free) and you can also enjoy snacks and pizzas (often).
Connection + Skill based
- Attend hackathons.
- Hackathon is a great way to challenge yourself and make friends from same/different universities and get to know different companies from the judges (who are usually more senior than those sent to the career expos, I will talk about career expos in the future).
- It will also give you invaluable experiences in working within a team under pressure — each member takes on a crucial role in a mini “startup project”. This teamwork is closer to what you might expect in an actual job compare to the university group assignments. (Thank you so much for pointing this out, Greg Thom)
- However, as only the winning team would get the most exposures for job opportunities (sometimes not even), which is really difficult to achieve, not to mention you have to stay up for XX continuous stressful hours for the competition. I would recommend you to take hackathons as a means to enrich your resume and challenge yourself for creative ideas instead of getting a part-time job from them.
Rule 3: Side-projects for Fun and Competitiveness
Yes, that is my academic result. It might surprise you because it is really bad.
So how can I find a job with a result as bad as this?
Because I have done tons of side projects in my spare time. I turn ideas into side projects and experiment upon them.
My side-projects helped me land my first job at Accenture
By the time I applied for my first job at Accenture, I already had plenty of experience in Python.
I used to use Python as my primary language to write my own scrapers, backend servers, and Machine Learning projects for fun. It helped me to talk about my own projects with the interviewers.
Order of Priority
When an employer receives a junior resume, he/she will be looking at things in the following order:
Work Experience > Project Experience AND Language/Framework Experience > Academic Results
In general, that’s the order you should prioritize for your career competitiveness and progression. However, it doesn’t mean it’s always fixed. If you have made greater achievements in the lower priority items (e.g. Ph.D. or owner of 1k-star open source repo), this priority can be different for you.
As you can see, the first priority is Work Experience, but you won’t have any work experience until you find your work.
Therefore, the only way is to do as many projects as possible and learn as many tech stacks as needed to do those projects.
On the other hand, contributions to open-source projects on Github can make a huge difference. (Thank you so much Kuan Lee, for pointing this one out)
I had a friend who was approached by Google recruiters because they noticed him contributing to a big open source repo.
What did he do? He sent a PR for fixing a word typo in the README.
It may sound simple, but most of the IT students have never committed a Pull Request in their entire degree.
Sometimes it’s just that one single PR that can make you noticed by recruiters for bonus marks.
What side-projects should I do?
Pick something that you are interested in, as this will be the most beneficial to your project experience growth.
Learn the tech stacks that you need in order to get there, this will greatly enhance your self-learning ability and you will know the things you need in order to develop your own product in the future.
If you can’t think of anything, do a quick google search, things like “Python projects for beginners” or “beginner data science projects”, which would give you a lot of contents to read about. Hopefully, you will find project ideas that would interest you enough to start working on them.
There will be failures, lots of half-done projects and lots of empty repositories that you probably have created but totally forgotten, or even ideas that you have started working on but later found they are un-doable. Don’t be upset, each of these side-projects form part of your learning experience. You will gradually develop the ability to see the goods and the bads from an idea.
On the bright side, most of the devs would want to have their own startups sooner or later, having heaps of side-projects will help you reach this goal faster :)
Trust me, the projects themselves should be rewarding enough once you see the magic of your idea turning into a working prototype.
This concludes my 3 fundamental rules for getting an early start on your career in Uni as an IT student.
Big thanks to Duane Hennessy and John Musca for correcting my grammar mistakes!
