If you can’t find a job after finishing a bootcamp

There are a lot of QA bootcamp and IT schools that offer programs, classes, courses and they offer very promising education that will eventually help with getting the job.

I decided to write this article myself, personally to help others with their journey so that you guys are aware about the biggest pitfalls at the end of this promising education options from the schools. I hope it helps you and saves you money and your time. Overall the time you spend on education is always good, so sometimes when someone ask me about some advice about education, I always support, because the best investment is investment in yourself.

Now, you spend thousands of dollars and spend half or even the whole year learning something new, practicing and struggling and it was intense and you feel super no confident because you are a student. So your default expectations will be that one company, maybe a startup will find your profile in LinkedIn and offer a job considering that you are a student and now have a diploma or certificate for the tools, programs, languages, technologies that have.

But in real live, what happens?

You graduate the school, and yes, you have someone from the school to ask questions, perfect, and some notes, and videos from the school and writings, and you profiles on LinkedIn and similar platforms, and a CV file with all the keywords and tech things you learned but, now you apply for the jobs spending days, weeks, months and there is no interest, what??? how? all this time, efforts, money for nothing?(

So here is the reality from the side of the IT company that is looking for someone to join their IT team, it is relevant to DEVs or QAs or DEVOPS, doesn’t matter, the thing is that 99.9% of the job opportunities are relevant for only experienced IT engineers, who can bring value and ideally the company wants to have budget for this person to grow, and sometimes it’s ok that person has small experience but %99.9 of theses candidates will be excluded at the initial filter by talent acquisition team by them looking through hundreds, sometimes thousands of different CVs and profiles. So this is what is happening. The truth is you won’t find the job if you don’t have experience working in an IT company. You need a resume file with tons of relevant experience to go through the initial filtration from the company recruiters. Once you pass the filtration the recruiter shares a few resume profiles to the tech team so they do a second round of filtration.

How to pass the initial filtration and second round of filtration? Get the experience! Of course you can add fake experiences to your profiles and your resume but you will lie and you don’t want that. Oh the feeling that someone asks ‘why did you lie in your resume’ – is definitely not the best one! So now how do get the REAL experience added to your profiles and CV file? You need an internship in a real IT company.

You need to work in the Agile environment with real tasks and guidance from more experienced IT engineers and make some real work experience, things where you meet, don’t meet or even exceed some expectations, got some achievements you can share. And all this will help you to pass a part of the final round of interviews as well where you will be getting some situational type of questions, that only engineer with own experience can answer. Note, AI (Artificial Intelligence) won’t help you much with this part, it is your personal unique experience, that you can get only by going through real things.

Ok, so now, how to find a bootcamp that can give you real experience? I can tell you that it’s almost impossible, and the big schools with thousands of students can’t help you with this. For Spin Career it was a huge challenge of example to find IT companies that are willing to be a partner and allow out students to work on their raw version of the application. This helps them and gives the experience to our school’s students.

Now, even how much experience is enough to get a first job? Well, no one can tell you, but my answer will be simple – as much as possible, but all the experience that you gain must be focused on a specific job title, if we are talking about QA – then it must be all closely relevant to QA, don’t add to your profile that you worked as a receptionist or administrator in beauty salon or electrician, only focus on the job you are applying to. Best candidate will have %99 match to the job listing that the company posted. Keep this in mind, as it is a very important to follow, even during the interview process focus only on the job you applied to, apply this advice to every answer you provide.

Once you manage to pass the 2 rounds of filtration, then I would focus on interview skills more and deeper. Interview skills is another topic and learning and practicing the programming language could be not enough because during the interview you use your sales skills and show your best qualities and skills in a brightest light. We have students who used to work in sales before and they actually having the highest rate of finding the first job, many times even before they finish the program. Almost forgot, make sure you did a mock interview with experienced IT engineer before you actually go to any real interviews, learn from video recordings of mock interviews, watch the common mistakes, red flags and don’t wait, start applying to the jobs as soon as possible, create your profiles with CV file as soon as possible, we had so many examples of graduates in the past that got a job in the middle of education so at some point we realized that it is the best approach to start your skills marketing on the early stages.

In case you agree or disagree with any of my advice let me know, honestly I use my and other instructors and colleges and graduates experience located in the United States. You may have your own experience that could be different and I wish you to find the right bootcamp that gives you all the tools and knowledge that will result in your dream job!

One of my good friends who also was struggling to find a job in IT very very long time ago also gave me a few ideas to write about so that we can help beginners.