Collaborative Post
These days there aren’t many careers that you can do without having a degree. Luckily, programming jobs are available for those that didn’t go the traditional college route. It’s an industry in which experience trumps education. When you learn by doing then this works much better for many jobs that need to know that you can handle the work.
When you can skip getting a degree, you won’t be saddled with student loans for the next few decades. Not only that, but you can move up in your job at a younger age since you likely are starting your working life sooner. If you are very passionate about coding and want to turn that passion into a career, then there are a number of ways to go about it. In this article, we will go over several so you can get started.
Photo by Danial Igdery on Unsplash
1 – Build up a resume
You may be a whiz when it comes to creating useful code. However, you need to have something to show for it to a recruiter or hiring manager. Without a robust resume that shows that you have been working on projects then you won’t get many offers.
Well before you start applying for jobs you should be building up your resume with useful experience. For instance, you should be working on some open source projects that can be verified so you can put that on your resume. There are also many companies who use the general public to work on their code. A Servicenow citizen developer, for example.
This shows that you not only know your stuff, but your work can be seen and verified. It also shows that you are able to work with others. This is a crucial ability to have since any job you get hired to do will require coordinating with others to complete a project.
2 – Stay focused
There are so many areas in which you can work as a programmer. Just about everything we do in our daily lives requires interacting with programming in some way or another. This means that you have to concentrate on one thing and be an expert at that.
If you love the idea of working on games, then you need to focus there. If it’s building architecture that software can be built upon then you can only be doing that. Trying to be a Jack-of-all-trades is never a good idea since you won’t stand out against the competition.
3 – Study up
One thing that you would get out of a degree is that you will understand the theory behind programming. This is also important but you can do it on your own. Make sure to study theory and understand how things work from an abstract perspective. This will not only make you a better programmer, but you may be asked about theory in an interview.
The more that you can show an interviewer that you know about programming inside and out, then the more likely you are to find a good job.