Landing Your First Job After CorrelationOne — Pt. 1 Getting Experience
Congrats! You just learned one of the highest and in demand skills in the market today, and yesterday’s price is not today’s price!
Now, comes the hard part. Yes, landing your first tech job is hard, but remember Python? You got through that, and you will get through this as well, and we’ll be here to help you! Yay!
The TLDR on me and why I’m qualified to give you the advise in this article. During my time in software engineering bootcamp BC (before CorrelationOne), I saw a lot of recruiters turning down recent grads using the excuse of “you don’t have any experience”. I was scared of repeating the same trauma as I did when graduating University, broke and unable to land a living wage role, so I refused to let a company give me permission to be a software engineer.
That day, I told myself “I’m a software engineer”, and started working as one by writing tech blogs, contributing to open source, volunteering as a software engineer to non profit tech companies, and revamping the poorly made ancient websites of local dentist and chiropractic offices in my city. I did this to get the experience I needed to splash on my resume and also for myself. A lot of learning in all that stuff above. I eventually landed my first full time dev role 3 months after graduating.
I used the same approach after finishing CorrelationOne’s DS4A/Empowerment, and was able to land a role using both backgrounds at a startup where I specialized in Computer Vision. I’m now on my second role AD (After Data) Science bootcamp at C1 as a Lead Developer Advocate at Ansys, where I am now specializing in simulations. Yea, I know I’m tech cool.
Oh, I also worked at Career Karma where I helped a bunch of us marginalized folks learn how to code and break into tech.
So, let’s get you that job now!
3 Hacks To Get Experience To Help You Land Your First Role
Volunteering
What?! I studied this hard to work for free?!
Yes and No. It’s temporary (and only if you want it to be). You need experience, and you need to network. The tech industry is a community, so go contribute your skills to the community.
How do I volunteer?
Well, I took the route of climate tech companies and open source projects. Below are some climate tech slack communities you can join. Share in your introduction that you’re interested in volunteering in a data related role, or skim the #volunteer channel to see what they’re looking for, or use the slack search bar. Happy mingling!
After you’ve been volunteering for ~ 3 months, ask your direct manager if they’ll give you the thumbs up to put this in the experience section of your resume. As long as you’re contributing consistent quality work they should say yes, and even be a reference for you. If not, you can either put this under the “Volunteer”, “Projects” or “Open Source” section of your resume (if what ever you’re working on is open sourced).
For open source projects outside of non profit volunteering, the best way to think about this is, “what products do I really enjoy?” Look those up on github and see which repos are asking for contributors. If they look too challenging skip to “Content Creation” below. Here is a resource on Data Science open source projects for additional ideas.
Content Creation
To steal a phrase used in Netlify’s DevRel team “use all the parts of the buffalo” here.
Huh?
A hack to content creation is as follows. Build a project, and use it as many times as possible. Example:
- Create a project. (This is the most important step!) Let’s say it’s a linear regression project predicting how many cases of ZIKA Brazil will have this time next year, which lives in a Google Colab Notebook so it can be easily open sourced. (Look at you open sourcing stuff!)
- Write a medium blog about the project where you walk through the concept of linear regression, the code, and the data
- Record a YouTube tutorial on it where you do the same thing
- Promote it on social media
Wow you just showcased like a bunch of skills out of one project. Don’t forget to put that google colab notebook in the “Projects” section of your resume and that medium blog under the “Publications” section if it got picked up by Towards Data Science or another medium publication. See… experience!
Forage
Um.. Idk what that is
Forage is a platform that helps recent grads get “virtual work experience”, so that they’ll have an easier time landing their first roles.
Oh, cool
Right?! Below are the data related virtual work experience opportunities you can start doing today. Remember that you’re very skilled and a role that is 100% data may be limiting for an awesomely skilled person as yourself, so don’t be afraid to look at other roles that would appreciate your new data skills! Each experience also has its own rules on how you can showcase this in your resume, so make sure to read and agree to that before starting the experience.
If you can’t access the below, please register or login to Forage. It’s Free!
Closing Thoughts
You got this. If you have other resources or ideas on how to get experience before landing your first job, please comment below to help the community.
