A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to speak with Students and upcoming Graduates from the Staffs Computing Society to share my own insights around finding placement and graduate work.
While I was there, a point I kept coming back to when discussing the challenges of finding work was advocating for one’s skills when you’re looking for your first role. If you are switching industries and don’t have directly related experience, it can be easy to feel like you don’t have anything to leverage in interviews or to make yourself stand out.
In my case, the only work experience I had before going back to University was almost exclusively Retail and Customer Service roles. When it came to the process of applying, I struggled a lot early on with how to sell my background positively in the applications I sent. I didn’t want to exaggerate my previous responsibilities, but I also felt like there were no noteworthy skills to make myself stand out. This changed when I went to speak with the University of Staffordshire’s Career Hub staff to have my resumes reviewed, and what I was taught by them is something that I try to pass on to Students who are at the same point I was in their careers.
To cut a long story short: yes, it counts, put it on your resume. That summer job you had counts. Your interests and hobbies count. The weekend projects you think might not impress anyone counts. Even if it doesn’t feel like it, you’ll have developed some kind of skill or displayed some outward characteristic from those endeavors that you can leverage when finding work to show you are a good fit for that role.
If by chance, you truly can’t find a way to relate that experience back to a position you’re applying for, you still come from a background and carry around a set of beliefs and principles that are uniquely your own; which may have likely been informed by those experiences. Software is made by other human beings. They’re not alien artifacts that were just randomly willed into existence one day. To make good software, a diverse selection of all these things are essential, and that includes your own perspectives.
Finally: you also just can’t anticipate what area of your work will catch people’s attention. I remember speaking to a Lead I interviewed with on my first day at Codeweavers, only to learn that a simple Web Scraper I wrote in a weekend for my friends was the project that swayed them into taking me on placement, rather than the projects that, in my head, were much more ambitious and worthy of discussion at the time. What you might think is pointless could be the deciding factor to others - don’t deny yourself that fighting chance and you might end up surprising yourself with the results.