Wondering if you could offer your input from either end of the spectrum. Like many here, I have been using coding boot camps to help change my career. For the last 10 years I have been working in sales, and for a few years before that, working in GIS. Needless to say my portfolio basically consists of projects I’ve completed from here and Free Code Camp. Recently I’ve been active posting profiles/resumes on various job boards and in the last 2 days been contacted by recruiters within a few days of each other. I am wondering, do I address my lack of experience up front or really try to sell my portfolio? What have you done (particularly when a recruiter contacts you about a job that requires experience)?
I know from experience a good chunk of what you do is learned on the job…there’s only so much you can prepare yourself for with education. On one hand I feel comfortable having this conversation, but on the other hand, I dread screwing up what could be an ideal opportunity. What do you guys have to share?
I’m a bit in a similar situation (though at the moment I’m trying to build experience in real projects before applying for interviews because I feel like that’s what I need first). For me the interview part is not the most anxious aspect of it, because I never had any experience in my previous positions, which is what I use when the subject comes up: “well I didn’t have experience when I applied for this job, neither for this one, neither for this one, and yet I learned pretty fast and was among the best of my colleagues after less than a year, I did it before, I can do it again.”.
No the biggest problem for me at the moment is more regarding the likely “coding problems” that you can get in interviews, on which I’m anxious to underperform because of my lack of experience.
So at the moment I’m doing challenges at coderbyte.com, but if anyone has a project that he/she would need someone to work with on, don’t hesitate to contact me, I know some C and some Python, a few notions of JS/HTML/PHP but nothing serious.
I haven’t had any interviews. I think I may have been contacted several months ago so frequently because I had just “put myself out there” and was fresh on the radar. Not sure if my portfolio is up to par, however.
I’ve been kind of getting discouraged, or more specifically, having lost motivation. I’ve also been applying to pre-sales/sales support type jobs in web development but haven’t been getting a sniff in that direction, either.
I need some good ideas. Once I leave my job, I’ll probably just dish out some money for a professional resume. It’s actually kind of a problem that I work in healthcare. The only recruiters that ever contact me are for nursing, and I suspect that anyone who looks at my resume will think that I only want something in nursing. So I need to do something to make myself stand out.
I’m still learning and practicing everything here. I’m almost done with the Data Science path, but only half-way through Python.
I’ve started building some simple things to show that I can make something in Python and have it input data into some graphs. Nothing incredible. I was thinking about making a Python resume. I thought maybe I could have some simple input commands that that would bring up parts of my resume like contact info or work experience. I thought that might be a clever idea, then I could put it on GitHub with a few of the other things I had been working on.
I don’t know a whole lot about GitHub, but I’m under the impression there is a lot of collaboration going on there. I’m still learning a lot here, and I have a lot more to do. If I start getting closer to completion and want to get ready for my portfolio, maybe we could create some sort of collaborative project? We could get a couple of people together, find something to work on, then we can all put our resumes in the project. What do you think?