According to the Vietnam IT Market report, 57,000 IT students with software majors graduate annually. With such a large number of students, competition is fierce. Every developer should now prepare thoroughly to gain a competitive advantage and successfully land a Junior Developer position.
It’s a good idea to keep this in mind and take action on the 3 following steps for better preparation:
We’re confident that if you follow these steps and develop your own soft skills and hard skills, you’ll be able to land your dream job!
Ready to dive in? Let’s go!
1. Learn and expand your knowledge continuously
Firstly, enroll in universities, colleges, or even some online courses to build a solid knowledge base. Check out the numerous resources available on Google. You can also read blogs or watch Youtube videos based on the topics you want to learn more about.
Additionally, content in technical books always dives deeply into specific projects, problems, or issues. These resources give you a chance to look at the motivation behind certain products, or previous developers’ experience with the same problems you might be facing now. Some books you can read are listed below:
- Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
- Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
- Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems
- The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
Understanding the fundamentals will help you to go deeper into more complex subjects. Acquiring knowledge in a technical field is always challenging but there is a silverlining to it. Knowledge acquisition presents a strong snowball effect that is once you learned one thing, the next thing will be a bit easier.
If you are looking for a junior position, it means you are still in a period of time where exploration should be your number one priority. Start with a topic you are comfortable with, read/watch/write to your heart content. During that process, you would the next topics you haven’t known yet. That is great, that means you are learning. Move on to another topic once you gain confidence. Your knowledge should expand like a drop of water.
2. Participate in software development projects
More than anything else, your code speaks for you. Thanh Trung, Junior Back-end Engineer at Parcel Perform Tech Hub, recommends a good way to look for new coding opportunities: “You can look at your daily life and see which process can be automated. In this way, you can start your own projects.”
You can also try looking for some open-source projects. If you are studying in a university, college or in any online courses, reach out to your lecturers. They will be aware of open-source projects and can offer you work opportunities. Don’t be afraid to ask them to mentor you, or ask for their professional assistance if you run into problems with your initiatives.
Internships are another opportunity to consider. Internships often provide important working experience that prepares you for a future full-time job. It’s also a terrific opportunity for you to practice for interviews. You can identify existing knowledge gaps and fill them to prepare yourself for the junior position. If you are offered an internship, congratulations on getting the chance to work on real projects, gain on-the-job experience, and resolve business issues.
3. Take part in Hackathons
Hackathons are opportunities to develop important skills like project management, coding, presentation skills, idealization, and more. You also have a chance to collaborate with others, learn from them and get feedback from technical experts.
There are some popular Hackathons such as Tiki Hacking Trail, VNG Code Tour, Shopee Code League, etc. If you’re interested in the web-based “escape server” game, you can try Server Heist.
Summary
Chau Long - our Junior Front-end Engineer shares: “We can’t do anything all at once, and we can’t suddenly be good right at the starting point. Therefore, if we are interviewed or working on your projects, and we already know something, then let them know; if not, just make sure we are ready to learn it and make sure the knowledge we learn will be kept in our heads. So simply learn as we go, no rush.”
If you’re aiming to get a junior web developer job, we strongly advise you to keep studying and updating your technical skills, then work on coding projects to enhance your hard and soft skills. If you’re ready for a new journey, it’s time to submit an application for your junior developer job.
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