How Can Aspiring Programmers Improve Their Chances to Find a Good Job?

Two weeks of self-study are enough to give an aspiring programmer an edge over others competing for the same job.

tl;dr

Build a basic program that will improve your knowledge and experience and add it to your CV as a proof of your advantage over other beginners.

In the next article, there is an example of such a program.

Step one- Become a beginner

For the sake of this article, a beginner is someone with at least basic knowledge and experience in any area of programming.

Understand where you are going

If you are completely new to programming, reading this article and articles like this is probably the real first step so you are on the highway to success already!

Try to understand what it is you want to achieve and how best to spend your time, money and effort to do so. The next sections will provide you with some tips about this.

Learn the basics of programming

This can also be combined with the next step of choosing a specialization.

There are many ways to study the basics of programming. It would probably take more than two weeks.

Loops, conditions, variables, pointers, and classes can all be studied from many sources:
University or college degree in computer science, a programming professional course, videos on YouTube, code academy or any other source.

Choose a specialization

Talk to friends face to face and on social networks, look at salary tables, at job offers around you, search on YouTube and google and try to assume what programming area is probably the best for you.

The general idea

Since you compete for your job with a lot of other beginners, you could try to get an advantage over them by getting some experience in the field you chose and to prove you have it-

Build a basic program and add it to your CV.

Understand the basics of your specialization

Not only understand but write code- a lot of simple working code. Get to the point where you have a working environment and build a “Hello world” program and gradually make it more and more complex until you feel safe to move to more complex stuff.

Decide what program to build

Here is our article about a possible program to build in the area of web development.

Try to combine some of the following ways to build a program that is challenging and proves you know what you’re doing but also easy enough for you to build it relatively good and fast.

• Talk to people in the industry. Face to face, on forums and social networks.
• Read blog posts about the latest trends, there are even some dedicated to beginners training.

It is super important to write every line of it and understand every line you write.

This will boost your confidence in your upcoming job interviews, your knowledge if you have to take tests and your skill in the first months of work so your colleges can easily build up your knowledge from there.

Plan your program

Possibly with an advice from other people or guides. Make sure you split it into small steps that you can achieve each of them in a matter of days. Use a source control to make sure no code is lost in the process and to prove your potential employers you know what it is and how to use it.

Attitude

Be ready for two weeks of endless writing, rewriting, deleting, consulting and learning. Don’t hesitate to change your plans in the process. Be open to advises criticism and try to build up your program in small steps.

DO IT!

Just Do it!