Breaking into the Industry: Strategies for Landing Your First Software Engineering Job

Okay, let's start this with a hard truth, getting your first job as a software engineer is not easy! We wish it was as easy as updating your LinkedIn profile and watching the messages from hiring managers roll in, but unfortunately, that's highly unlikely.

First off we won't discuss how to get the required skills. You can do that by joining our Full Stack Engineering course, either full-time or part-time, instead, we will look at strategies to get the role once you can code.

Craft your CV Carefully

There are plenty of excellent CV examples online so we won't go into too much detail here, however, there are a few pointers that will really make a difference, especially if your aim is to land your first software engineering job.

Put yourself in the hiring manager's shoes, what do they want from a potential employee? In our experience hiring managers are most often concerned with a candidate's ability to solve problems, communicate, and work as part of a team. So when you list out your previous work experience, make sure you emphasize these points. Of course, never lie on your CV, however, you are free to emphasize points you want to talk about and omit those that aren't relevant to the role.

During the Day 1 to 1 career support our graduates receive personalized CV reviews to ensure that they are always putting their best self forward. An example of this might be that if you worked as an admin assistant in an office, you would be better off talking about how you documented processes for future employees, rather than the time you helped organize the office party. Whilst the second one does show organizational skills, there's only so much space to talk about your experiences.

Keep Applying!

Whilst this is an obvious one, you'd be surprised at the amount of people who simply do not apply for enough jobs. We recommend applying for a minimum of 15 per week, which works out to about 3 per day (assuming you take weekends off).

That said, it's very tempting to simply click on that 'Easy apply' button. We recommend steering clear of this and instead taking some time to research the company and apply directly. With a bit of searching, you can almost always find who is hiring for the job and contact them or another member of their team directly.

Always write a cover letter or cover note introducing yourself. Your CV has everything we need to make sure you're qualified for the job, the cover letter tells us about you as a person.

There's a lot of conflicting info online about whether writing a cover letter is worthwhile, In some instances it's likely to get ignored but honestly, there's no harm in sending one as it will most likely be viewed positively by the manager or HR representative.

The first few applications that I sent took ages, I spent probably about two hours on each one, crafting the perfect cover letter and modifying my CV for each role. Once I applied for a few jobs, I had a bunch of past examples to work from, so each application took about 20 or 30 minutes to send.

During the Day 1 to 1 career coaching, we support our students with writing cover letters to make sure that job applications become a lot quicker.

ABC: Always Be Coding!

We get it, applying for jobs can be an arduous task, You need to take some time for yourself, and what better way to do that than to build software to further hone your skills?

It doesn't really matter what you build, just make sure you are building. Make sure that your Github profile URL is on your CV and is included with every application that you send, and keep pushing your work here.

We know from prior experience, and from conversations with hiring teams that managers absolutely do look at a candidate's GitHub profile to get an idea of how they approach problems, and also to see if they use best practices.

Our Full Stack Engineering Graduates leave the course with a minimum of 4 portfolio-ready projects to showcase to managers.

Acing the Technical Interview

We have written a whole post on how to navigate the interview process here: cracking-the-code-tips-for-excelling-in-software-engineering-interviews

When it comes to the technical interview we recommend showcasing your problem-solving abilities first and foremost, asking questions to clarify the problem you are solving, breaking down the problem into its component steps, and then starting to code.

At FlatPack we coach our students both throughout the course and afterwards on how to best handle technical interviews and tasks.

We hope that this has given you some clarity on the steps to get your first software engineering job. Take a look at our Software engineering course available with individualised support and world class training.