Junior developers can make a variety of mistakes while looking for their first job or early in their career that can impact their future opportunities. I have compiled a short list of the most important ones to avoid in your journey, let's go 🚀
Not networking enough: Failing to actively network with people in the industry, attend industry events, and build relationships with others can limit job opportunities. Networking also includes asking for feedback from others, such as mentors or colleagues, on how to improve.
Being too focused on one technology: Becoming too focused on one technology or programming language and not diversifying skills can limit job opportunities in the future. The world and tech itself is constantly changing, being unwilling to adapt to new technologies or programming languages, or being resistant to change, can limit job opportunities in a rapidly evolving field.
Jumping from stack to stack: Although the world of tech is changing and increasingly becoming fluid, it is very easy to get carried away by new technologies, one of the way this happens is from following job requirements and learning too many technologies to be qualified for a certain job and ultimately not being solid in any of these technologies and/or languages.
Ignoring the importance of a portfolio: In as much as a degree or certificate is good, it still doesn't beat the importance of a strong portfolio. Not having a portfolio of work to showcase skills and abilities to potential employers can make it difficult to land a job.
Not being proactive: Don't wait for opportunities to come to you, actively search and apply for jobs, reach out to recruiters, and attend networking events to expand your chances of finding the right job.
Underestimating the importance of soft skills: personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people. Soft skills, such as communication, teamwork, and problem-solving, are just as important as technical skills in many industries.
Not updating your online presence: A strong online presence, including a professional LinkedIn profile and a portfolio website, can help you stand out to potential employers. Failing to keep your online presence updated can hurt your job prospects.
There are a lot of other mistakes and neglects, but I chose to focus on these 7 which I consider to be more important or more detrimental.
Thanks for reading
connect with me on twitter @Frontend Jedi and follow me here for bi weekly content on frontend engineering.
Top comments (6)
This is good
I would say number 1 and 4 are not really necessary
In my opinion, number 1 reduces the time it takes to find a good job through recommendations and legit forum listings while number 4's importance cannot be overstated, companies hiring junior devs want to know you can build something without supervision, CRUD apps, landing pages etc. what better way to show you can than through your portfolio.
Through being involved many times in hiring developers over the years, I have to say that the importance of a portfolio can be be greatly overstated, and usually is. Sorry if this is a bit lazy, but you can read more on what I think about this subject here.
I have read the comment and I have to say; great explanation and I completely agree with you. I might have to be more specific next time cos in my post, the portfolio doesn't really imply a portfolio website, I meant to describe portfolio as what it is by definition. A GitHub profile could be a portfolio, a dev.to profile could also be a portfolio and so can a Behance profile. I really love your explanation and would love to learn more about hiring processes from you.
I think they really matter.