Critique my CV, Been applying for 2 years!

Career Advice
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Been a camper for 5 years, finished Responsive Web design, Javascript and Front-end libraries certification. Been applying for junior front end (React or javascript) for almost 2 years. I got 3 interviews total. I live in Eastern Europe so we have less opportunities but still, that number is low.

I made changes to my CV over the time here is the latest version

Format
Move projects to the top section pushed education lower since I have non CS degree.
Projects
I added new/better projects as I finished them
Wording
I asked my friends with better english to correct my sentences.

But obviously I need to do better.

Questions:

  • How can I improve my CV in general?
  • Are my projects good or they are too basic?
  • I rarely use Github could that be the problem?
  • How can I can experince
  • Any feedback is appreciated

Specific question
Here 90% of junior position require a CS or engineering degree AND 2-4 years of experience :slight_smile:
With that in mind, how do I tailor my CV to have a better chance of getting hired?

Thank you

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I’m not going to try to give advice on the format or wording of the resume, because I have no experience with that. The thing that stands out to me though is that you just don’t really have much on there. You have three projects that you did for a course and three fairly basic courses. You don’t have any employment history, large projects, or experience developing with a team or for stakeholders. Most of the space on your resume is taken up by the same technologies (React, JavaScript, etc) repeated over and over.

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@Realitydistortionfie Read this and apply it https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-write-a-resume-that-works/
@Realitydistortionfie Also use https://www.canva.com/ for a nice CV template. yours is not good.

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The average job search usually is a few months, so once you starting getting closer to 1 year, you have to change up your approach as something isn’t working, to keep going to 2 years of applying, just means your still approaching things more or less the same way.

I’d worry less about the resume itself, and rather what it represents about you. You can change wording all you want, but if your CV lacks substance you wont get many interested employers.

As mentioned above you have 3 projects on it. If you’ve been a camper for a few years, having only 3 projects is somewhat disappointing. Going further, not having a github or portfolio to show off your work only hurts you. This is especially true if your a front-end dev. You need to have a place to show off what you’ve built since its all visual UI’s. They also should be fairly polished to stand out.

Its possible to get hired without a degree, but you need experience. Experience building stuff similar to what you’d be doing in the job, experience with tooling used, working with others, and just generally building and learning. If you can do that on your own and can show it off well enough, employers will see you as someone who can do the job right now rather than one who will need training to do the job.

Now all of that experience is out there. None of the tooling used for a front-end job costs money, there are tons of free resources, there are communities to work with, and there are plenty of projects to build.

How can I improve my CV in general?

Focus less on the CV, and more on its contents. They are too sparse. You should have more content than can fit on the page.

Are my projects good or they are too basic?

I don’t know where/how to see your front-end projects, which is a big flag. Add them to a portfolio + github pages, or something so the curious can find and see your work. No recruiter will go to github, download your code and view it locally. You need to make it available. They also need to look good if your going to be front-end only.

I rarely use Github could that be the problem?

Yes, git is almost always asked as a “nice to have” skill, and github is an extension of that. Github is how you can show off your work, skills, history. Without it its hard to get a grasp on your work.

How can I can [gain] experience

Build more stuff, anything, anywhere, and show it off. If you can build something that can blow the socks off people, you’d get hired faster than if you build a bunch of simple projects. More complex projects, more tooling used, more technology used, all looks more impressive.

Good luck, keep learning, keep building!

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Format is fine. If you really are worried (and imo it’ll make no difference here) the important things are a. is it easy to read (avoid colours and fancy formatting, there’s no real point) which.leads to b. if you shove it into an automated system (LinkedIn, Indeed.com, etc) does that system pick up everything correctly. A clean word document is fine.

With your CV though, as has been said, there’s nothing really there. What have you done for three years? If the last related thing you’ve done involved creating landing pages for clients why is there not more detail about that? The three projects are from the description just basic toy apps. If there’s something special about them (like it’s a full drum sequencer application you’ve got on the play/app store or something, for example) then you need to explain that. They aren’t linked so can’t tell. If they’re on CodePen & are just the basics needed to pass the FCC test suites, that plus you saying two years of searching looks really quite bad.

I’m sorry this comes across as quite harsh, but you are being judged on this by whoever you’re sending applications to. You can do this, but I think you need to severely up your game here, you should have more to show at this point.

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If you want to get a job drawing the Hulk and Spider Man do not submit your original comic book or other art. Send them your drawings of the Hulk and Spider Man. That’s what is relevant to them and they can judge how you fit in to their company. Your projects are relevant to a software education not to a companies projects. Make a portfolio of business websites and the frontend pages that a customer would use if they had logged into their banks website. You can think of at least two more industry examples in addition to my bank customer suggestion. Look at the companies that you are applying to and make some web business software pages that might be relevant and make sure they are branded even if it’s a fictional brand. You’ll use your portfolio to out compete new college grads for the job because they have the same projects as you.

I used to recommend CodingPhase’s portfolio advice on YouTube to get a job, but Coder Foundry has refined it even more. Coder Foundry has additionally recommended to invent an UI for any algorithm challenges you may have done and brand them on their own webpage. For example they invented FizzBuzz Energy Drink and the FizzBuzz results are printed to a striped table making them more compact. The whole thing can be above the fold. Make sure it looks good because non-technical people will see it first so it has to look nice. And recruiters like it because it gives them a visual example that they “can sell” to clients.

If you want links to specific videos reply to me and I’ll look them up and post them.

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Thank you everyone for your feedback. I really appreciate it and I will respond to everyone soon :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thank you for your detailed and helpful response Brad.

Your main points create impressive projects, put them in a visually attractive portfolio and be active on Github.

I want to start building right away, Two questions

  1. How do I choose projects?

a) You mentioned above

“If have experience building stuff similar to what you’d be doing in the job, "

So make a projects related to the company, like this correct?

  1. Research companies offering jobs in my area
  2. Most are in sectors PaaS, CRM or Fintech
  3. Pick one - PaaS (Platform as A Service)
  4. Make a PaaS React App that is better/different than theirs

b) My research in choose projects
In reddit found a post curated “project tutorials” but are tutorial style project so I don’t think its useful.
Other posts give vague advice like make project that is useful or do a challenging project. Are there any resources out there for project or I can follow part a above?

If you can build something that can blow the socks off people, you’d get hired faster than if you build a bunch of simple projects. More complex projects, more tooling used, more technology used, all looks more impressive.

  1. How do I set effective deadlines?

I have problem with time management; spent 2 months on javascript calculator. Obviously depends on project type, size and my skills. But I want to general idea what average developer should do so I can measure myself.

How many days/weeks deadline ( assuming I work 7 hrs a day 6 days a week)
a.For a medium size project React, Redux, couple of tools, nice CSS flex?
b. For a more complex project what should my deadline be like?

I’m planning to spend next 4-6 months (7 hours a day ) building 4 medium complexity projects. Is that a good goal or I could do better?

Thank you

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A lot of the questions your asking have no definitive answer since it really depends on you and your goals.

Lets say you need a job in 6 months, your goals and answers to all of your questions would be totally different than if your goal is get a job in 1 year, or on the flip side, if you need a job ASAP.

So make a projects related to the company, like this correct?

Not really, lets say your applying to Facebook. You could make a Facebook clone, but if you actually worked for them you might be working on some small feature of Facebook, or on an internal application no end user would ever see/use.
You should strive to build whatever you build using what you’d use on the job at Facebook. So odds are they use React, even internally, git, microservices, their own internal cloud services, highly scalable DB’s, real-time communication, etc. The more you know of what Facebook probably uses, the more technologies you could already get a leg up. You can also do your own research to see what companies are already using in your area, and attune your skills for such. Lots of “nice to haves”, like knowing Linux and git are used everywhere for example.

How many days/weeks deadline ( assuming I work 7 hrs a day 6 days a week)

Depends on your skill level. If your a god at React/Redux/CSS/Design/etc, it comes down to features. I would say the simple calculator project could probably be done in 1 day if you knew 100% of the technical details. However this isn’t realistic as I assume you weren’t a god that knew 100% of what they were doing out of the gate. The “flip side” of how long it could take if you drag your feet comes down to more how intelligent you are at fixing problems and getting the project “finished”. You could of spent a year building the most perfect calculator project, but there are other things to learn and build.
Perfection is the enemy of done.

I’m planning to spend next 4-6 months (7 hours a day ) building 4 medium complexity projects. Is that a good goal or I could do better?

Focus less on the number of projects, and more on what you learn from them. You can learn more building 1 vastly complex project than 4 medium, but basically the same projects. If by the 4th project you just “going thru the motions”, you stop learning much, and get less and less knowledge for the time spent.

Finally don’t lose sight of the goal. The only “bar” is getting the job or not, anything else is basically fake. You don’t spend X amount of hours and suddenly become “worthy of the job”, or you don’t learn X Y and Z and suddenly get hired 100% of the time. Keep learning, keep applying, keep getting feedback, keep improving from that feedback.

I think its fair to say if your applying for as long as you have and haven’t gotten anywhere, you must change your approach.

Good luck, keep building, keep learning!

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Thank you for your advice, it helped a lot :slight_smile:

I will try to put it to use.