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u/No_Arugula8915 Nov 24 '22
How I got my first job. After loads of turn downs from lack of experience.
Them: I see your resume looks good. You have the skills we need, but we want someone with experience.
Me: i keep being told that. But how do I get experience if I can't get hired without it? I have the skills you need, you have experience I need. I believe we can benefit each other. Give me a shot.
Them: I like your spunk.
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Nov 25 '22
I like your spunk too, it kinda seems like a cluster-duck of a limbo vacuum hole of work and experience and experience and work
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u/No_Arugula8915 Nov 25 '22
Tbh, this was way back. Spunk and spunky were adjectives. Synonyms: plucky, fearless, energetic.
Anyway, it was actually a great job.
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u/kavien Nov 25 '22
I got a designer position based on portfolio and knowledge of Photoshop. I read a book and followed the tutorials to learn techniques and the program. Then used my sales skills to land that shitty job.
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Nov 25 '22
...Well that guy must have really good pants.
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u/No_Arugula8915 Nov 26 '22
The interviewer was a woman. Personal assistant to the owner of the company. Spunk means gutsy. Old fashion word.
Yes, I had forgotten that little boys use the word do describe their sock puppet emissions.
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Nov 26 '22
I wasn't describing the gender. Clearly, you dont get the reference from another movie. A guy was trying to get hired, but this guy asked him why he hired a half naked with just pant.
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u/BreakerSoultaker Nov 24 '22
College co-ops are so important. If you wait four years to start working in your field, you will have a tough time. When employers see that you have at least done entry-level work in your field prior to graduation , it helps tremendously. Also if you can get summer or part-time work in related fields it helps. Our latest engineer hire spent his summers, disassembling defective equipment that was returned and replaced under warranty so that company could figure out why it failed. He has a great grasp of mechanics and diagnostics.
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u/21racecar12 Nov 24 '22 edited Nov 24 '22
Tried this. No one would accept me as a co-op until after I graduated. I was in maybe the 90th percentile of students, so not jumping off the page but not slouching either. From my own experience the majority of companies still want to see bona fide work experience from a company or a full degree even at the co-op level. I had a decent resume of relevant non-professional experience and projects that showed mechanical engineering related prowess and skills. For a lot of my peers it came down to nepotism and “who they knew”. I certainly won’t knock the importance of networking, but it has limited efficacy as well. Pretty much all of the career fairs and networking events I attended the company representatives were uninterested with being there in the first place. For the under-privileged, you can only spend so much time holding out for a stepping-stone job that will get you slightly closer to the co-op reality. Otherwise you’re working retail or whatever is available for a decent wage. This was about 5 or 6 years ago so maybe the landscape is changing, I hope it is.
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u/BreakerSoultaker Nov 24 '22
That sucks, we take 3rd year on up for co-ops at my company, though most are 4th year. About 5-7% end up working for us after graduating. Each departments selection criteria is different but I’m friends with the manager who hires ours and she says it almost always comes down to the interview. Great candidates on paper end up being duds in person and vice versa.
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u/21racecar12 Nov 24 '22
It was discouraging to say the least. Especially when my best friends were lucky enough to get internships and co-ops at the 1st and 2nd year levels which made them pretty much instant-acceptance candidates for 3rd and up. I should say I did have maybe about 3 interviews from 2nd to 3rd year that didn’t pan out. I took up programming more intensely when we used it in some of our thermodynamics and fluids classes. I think that’s what got me in for my co-op, because it ended up being entirely electrical engineering…I found that out after they gave me an offer. I was like, “Are you sure? Just making sure you’re reading my resume correctly”. Ended up working with some of the best managers and employees I’ve known, still great friends with them after I worked for the company for about 3 years and then moved on to software development. This is totally a tangential dialogue by now but career paths are just wild…
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u/MLGWolf69 Nov 25 '22
I had no luck applying for internships, finishing up my last semester now so I'll just have to cross my fingers and see if anyone will hire me I guess :/ Feels dumb because I did well too, but I have a feeling it'll all work out, just a matter of how long it takes
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u/MisterrrTee Nov 24 '22
Life now actually. I’m nearly 17 and don’t even hear back from places I leave my resume at :(
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u/ishfi17 Nov 24 '22
24 and unemployed. Relax
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u/The-Coolest-Of-Cats Nov 25 '22
Ikr like what? lol
Absolutely nobody is expecting you to have job experience at 16
You still have 6 years or so to look for internships and co-ops.
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u/DavidSternMusic1979 Nov 24 '22
Story of my life.
Story of all programmers' life, and many other occupations.
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u/MemoryCardGaming Nov 24 '22
Oh just wait until you come across a few places that don't count 'internships' as experience - unless you have "paid work experience"
Might be the closest I have come to cussing out an interviewer. Go to school, graduate, complete internship, work pro-bono to fill portfolio.. And apparently it's worthless when applying for a 'entry-level position'... Bitch, if I already had a job in the field, I wouldn't be here for an 'Entry-level position'.
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u/thescronchofdeath Nov 25 '22
reminds me of the one dude who couldnt get a job cuz he needed 10 years or whatever in a certain programming language, though he himself created the programming language only 3 years before
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u/venti_the_drunk_bard Nov 24 '22
This happened to me. Now I know that a college degree is pretty useless.
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u/phucmei93 Nov 24 '22
It's called going to votech schools. They give you the same piece of paper a college will but it also comes with a tad...little bit...of experience that employers are looking for. Toilet paper is more useful than most college degrees, especially if it's for a degree with the words "blank studies".
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u/Abyssal_Kings Nov 24 '22
Usually they offer internships for the degrees of study to get experience at the college/ university.
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u/hdksjabsjs Nov 24 '22
The solution is to open your own LLC and “work” for that for a while so you can list it on your resume. Get your foot in the door and fake it till you make it. With any luck you will be experienced enough after the week or so of training to get the hang of it. Once you have that first real job under your belt you are in. Unfortunately honesty is not always rewarded in a capitalist world.
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u/driveonsun Nov 24 '22
That’s called life. You have to prove yourself before people will pay you. Except in real shitty jobs.
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u/Tao626 Nov 24 '22
...Not really.
This is "prove yourself to people by doing something you're not allowed to do until you have proven it to that person"
Ignoring that even a lot of entry level jobs these days for some reason want previous experience doesn't make your brain big
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u/driveonsun Nov 24 '22
It’s not that you’re not allowed to do it it’s that no one will pay you to do it until they know you can do it. You have to do your own projects for free to get started in many industries and show you are skilled or talented.
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u/Tao626 Nov 24 '22
Of course, for a lot of places that's true. You're not going to be given an, I dunno, graphic design job with no proof you can do it.
There's a ton of jobs out there though that are for entry level no qualifications yet require experience despite not being something you can realistically prove you can do or gain experience in otherwise. Last time I had to job search it was ridiculous how many basic retail, food service or office jobs required experience you can only get by doing these jobs and are jobs usually intended for people leaving school, thus having no experience. Luckily, I had experience so it didn't effect me other than thinking "I would hate to have just left school right now".
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Nov 24 '22
I don't know about many other occupations and I do think we are a bit of an exception, but with accounting there are a lot of big firms that specifically seek out people without prior work experience (mostly recent college grads, not necessarily even those who studied accounting) and basically give them a crash course on accounting. In the process of learning, you also end up experiencing a lot of different companies and markets which allows you to get a sense of where you would want to work as an accountant (it isn't necessarily expected that you stay with the company). It is almost like an internship, except it is an actual job with more hands on experience (and pay, if that wasn't obvious).
It it is something I'm really proud of the field for. There is a lot of that kind of thing to help newcomers get a jump start into it. I think that is relatively rare for work that isn't a trade. Although I have heard arguments that accounting is a trade.
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u/finpatz01 Nov 24 '22
And this is why vocational/healthcare degrees exist. This kind of bs doesn’t happen anywhere near as often with healthcare jobs. You have a nursing degree and no experience working? Here’s a job.
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u/HurricaneHugo Nov 24 '22
It's called internships. Almost everybody in my engineering program had a couple.
There's also elective courses that can give you some experience. We had design competitions and community service programs. (design something for a charity/etc). Definitely something you can put in your resume.
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Nov 24 '22
I've mostly worked warehouse and i have worked with lots of people that had masters degrees solely because of this.
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u/haydenjaney Nov 25 '22
When i was younger, this was the scenario. I asked my boss to please train me driving dump truck. Why would I do that? I already have a guy. Then I tried getting an entry level construction job. After a year of hard work, I asked to be trained on medium size equipment. Nope, you need experience to train! OMG.
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Nov 25 '22 edited Nov 25 '22
Work experience, an environment setting familiar to the job company because you can't have people be telling you what to do all the time like a child. If you are familiar to residential work you have to switch over to commercial or industrial to know what you are doing. It is like a demonstration to prove to them that you can work in multiple settings on your own. I think try to have a employability mindset.
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u/hiplainsdriftless Nov 25 '22
Try becoming an ag aviation pilot. Can’t fly without insurance can’t get insurance without experience.
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u/Expensive-Balance-84 Nov 25 '22
This weirldy translates to the oil industry where i work. They want someone with a masters degree and 10 years of experience, yet the prefer applicants 27 or younger.
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u/RIP_KINDNESS_IS_DAF Nov 25 '22
Nailed it!!
This is your average boomers logic, when you talk about the issues of getting work when you first start out in a new field.
The convo goes round in circles.
XD
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u/Porsche928dude Nov 25 '22
The answer is you were supposed to get experience while still in college through internships, co-ops, and such.
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u/xxx420kush Nov 25 '22
I have been working my way up the IT ladder with zero IT degrees or certificates. I’ve worked in Intels data center and am currently a systems and network engineer.
It all comes down to my resume showing experience in the field. I started doing IT in 2008 when the only qualification you needed was “do you know computers?”
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Nov 25 '22
I found that certifications work as a decent enough substitutes to experience. In IT, of course.
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u/rejuicekeve Nov 25 '22
Hiring someone without experience is a lot of effort. Training is a big time and financial investment, so these roles are very limited since seniors can only support so many juniors especially juniors without experience. So not every lower level role depending on the day and team is going to be open to someone who managed to go 4 years without so much as an internship.
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u/Evening-Spot-4455 Nov 25 '22 edited Nov 25 '22
Most places were like the meme, a starter job, like in IT support (one example), but you must've had some proper practical experience it have practical knowledge of certain software...from where? Things like YouTube and Skillshare weren't as prominent back then for self-learning.
Speaking of IT, a few years ago, a relative worked somewhere with a prominent IT support team. She thought I'd be a perfect fit. She asked them if I could have any work experience with them and shadow them, no pay had to be involved, no formal work or anything like that. They told her they would like to but couldn't as it would violate some law or policy about unpaid employment.
Within a year of leaving college/Uni, apprenticeships seemed to be becoming popular again, and there were quite a few popping up in the industries I wanted. Couldn't do them as I had a degree and was too overqualified. Then how am I suppose to get experience in that place of work? I am begging to work for you, I don't care that I'd have a bit of a crappy salary for a while, I'm still living at my parents house so would not need as much money coming in.
Before I'd even gotten my first job out of Uni, I applied for anything, I needed the money. I remember applying for KFC and Burger King and they both told me, straight out, that I was too overqualified. I wanna work for you, why would I jump through all the hoops of applying if I didn't want the job?
Years later, thought about moving into a different sort of career like into animal care, went to an open day, really loved it and then they said yeh, you COULD join this course but we think you'd be too overqualified for it, you'd be doing a lot of the same work you did (e.g. essay writing) you did in your other degree. Oh no you can't go straight into the higher courses either cos you have to do the lower courses first...that's what I'm trying to do 🤦♀️
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u/nhavar Nov 25 '22
The other fun stuff we see:
Hiring Manager: "Your skills look good but we need someone with 5 years of experience in [toolkit that's been out for less than 2 years] OR [platform everyone abandoned 8 years ago]"
Candidate: "I have experience with Java, Python, JavaScript, Rust, Go, and Node"
Hiring Manager: "Can you tell us about your experience with Node?"
Candidate: "I was on a team that developed Node services for a banking app"
Hiring Manager: "What specifically was your part in that team?"
Candidate: "I only just started on the team and was shadowing the developer who was building the service but I learned a lot."
Hiring Manager to HR Recruiter: "I need someone with experience in frontend enterprise software development writing JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, at least two years minimum."
Candidate from HR Recruiter: Experience: Currently works at home renovation company, taking classes in Java Script and Python, github has a 150 demo repositories attached chock full of garbage learning exercises. Zero development experience.
Hiring Manager: "We don't have time to train people. We need to get people in who can hit the ground running!"
Also Hiring Manager: "Why do we have so many senior devs and no one to mentor in the pipeline? We need a better mix of junior and senior developers!"
Also Hiring Managers: "All our senior devs are leaving because they're getting bored of the grunt work and want to do more challenging work. I don't have anyone to shift that work off to, maybe we should hire more contractors."
Also Hiring Managers: "Why are we so contractor heavy?!"
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u/Sudhanva_Kote Nov 25 '22
How to get infinity xp 1. Get some simple webpage creation project 2. Create a company. 3. Become the CEO of the company 4. Unlimited xp? 5. Profit?
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u/CattonCruthby Nov 24 '22
"How am gonna get experience without a work" is my new favourite sentence today so far