Hello! Here we are for the last piece of our journey about switching career to IT. If you are starting to read from here, I strongly recommend to you to go here first: https://it4newbie.com/2023/01/03/be-ready-to-stiwch-gears-and-get-into-the-coding-world-part-1/.

Anyways, lets dive to, what I believe, what it is really important: Find a job.

III – LOOK FOR A JOB

This topic it is too broad, and we need to be concise and deep enough to give you some help. In order to accomplish this, I’m going to give to you some ideas to think about on: a) when are you ready for the job; b) how to get a chance for interview. You need to be prepared to more thoughts than exactly answer, because that is how I see I can truly help you (there is no one answer fits all).

a) When are you ready for the job? There is no such definition. Nobody can tell you exactly when you are ready. Yes, I agree that some requirements are essential (git, functions, APIs…), but walk with me: how much do you need to know about each of these things? Because you can’t define exactly where to draw the line is my point here. But anyways, we need to be ready. If you never realize about how the business world works, let me give you a hint: It wants from you the best implementation of a solution as fast as you can. And why this is important to note? Because they are not looking how much do you know about something, they want to see how much time you are going to spend coming up with solutions (time is money). Therefore, this could be used as a ruler to you on how much prepare you are. Adding one more thought, salary range is based on this ruler, the more experience you have, less time learning and more delivering products. Since you are switching career path, one advice I give to you is: accept less money and go from there increasing by delivering. Focus on getting inside first.

b) how to get a chance for interview. Being honest with you, this is lucky. Most people get uncomfortable when I say this, maybe for the reason that nobody can control it and they wish (or want to believe) that they control their faith. For example, my first interview happened during the gathering of our family for the Christmas eve. We were talking about life and my wife talked about how much I was studying to get an IT job. Her ancle than heard and connected me with someone he knew and from there, I got the job. How do you call something like this? I had no control, nothing to do with my desire…it just happened. Jobs are like this, opportunities that are presented out of the blue. Don’t get me wrong about one thing: You need to be prepared to take advantage of this moment, this on you, for sure. No matter what, lucky follows the prepared ones.

Well, this is not much a formula for the success. Life is not that straightforward as we wish. Specially to someone change career path, there is a lot of sacrifices and step backs to accomplish what we want. Sure, there is concrete actions that you should take in order to accomplish your goals: build projects, study as much as you can, connect to people from the area… but none of them will guarantee a job.

Having this in mind all the time helped me to never give up, because I knew it was a matter of time, it took me 4 years of waiting (preparing, studying, connecting) … but I knew to the bottom of my heart, the day would come. And sure thing, if you persist long enough, it will come to you too.