So I’ve been job hunting for the last 2 months and I keep running into junior roles that require 2-3 years of experience and most of the times a relevant degree, and so far I’ve been ignoring them. Should i try applying to these positions or should I keep looking? All advice would be appreciated since I am sure everyone here has gone through them and get discouraged.
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try applying - the listed “requirements” are mostly a wish list or also misinterpreting of actual needs from HR that doesn’t know anything of what the dev team actually needs in a new member. If you partially cover the requirements, try. If you don’t at all, maybe not.
you can find listed required experience of N years for technologies that have been around only N/2 years…
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Not just that they list a lot of frameworks I have no previous experience with, that’s the discouraging part for me. I always end up thinking I don’t know enough or be competent to do the job.
I will say though, it’s a hard sell to convince a company to hire you if you have neither experience not credentialed training. Companies need to know you can do the job. It’s very time consuming and expensive to train a developer on your project, so companies don’t want to hire someone who won’t pan out.
(I have no idea why this was listed as a specific reply to one person…)
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Not knowing an exact framework or technology isn’t as big of a deal if you have demonstrated that you can learn a similar framework or technology.
To be honest, it depends on the strength of your portfolio.
If you can demonstrate great work, then the credentials are less important.
There is no harm in applying - the absolute worst thing that will happen is that you won’t get the job. You already don’t have the job, so you lose nothing.
Even if you hear nothing back, you gain something: you know that something is holding you back, so now you can start to hone in on what that might be.
Get a couple of decent projects to show off. Apply for everything that’s not obviously absurd (think CTO / senior with 15 years, etc - anything labelled Junior is definitely up for grabs). And when you get rejections, make changes in ways you think are useful - change the phrasing on your resume, add a new JS library to your skill set, try to engage more with the community / open source…whatever.
It’s a long, hard slog to be sure, but don’t let the phrasing of the ads put you off - applying to everything is step one. Take that step.
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