How not to be an entry or junior developer? need some advice

Career Advice
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I understand this might be hard to achieve for someone with no work experience but, how can i truly jump to an intermediate level? what sort of projects(portfolio) do i need for an intermediate level job? I don’t really wanna be a junior developer.
I ask this because i noticed it is too flooded with entry developers. I literally saw a linkedin job post with 1300 applicants (eww).
I also noticed some fake profiles, someone literally had a portfolio with around 300 technologies, he claimed to be a full stack developer.

I’m willing to put all my energy into this extra effort.

About me: I was born with a computer and learnt actionscript from a book at age of 14~ (33 now) and worked as a computer tech during my 20’s and after a decade i decided to return to coding with actionscript knowledge only.
I returned a year ago, what i have learnt so far: the syntax of Python, Javascript(thanks actionscript) and some cpp which i always wanted to learn and like. Edit: HTML and CSS too.

I’m also programming sockets in python and love it, super fun, plan to get deeper.

The project i’m coding:

Currently, i’m coding a website for booking flights, like booking. I wanna code it not using frameworks for the front end and i plan to use python for back end. I’m going to use the flightlabs api.

Dunno what else to say, can you recommend me how not to be an entry level developer? maybe some free work? how much github activity should i have?

Okay thanks for reading and have a good weekend!

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I don’t believe you can directly jump into an intermediate position without intermediate-level experience.

The only exception I can think of is if you have relevant experience doing something similar to an entry level position. Something like freelancing and doing big projects, then you could leverage that and try your hand at more experienced positions.

However, if you show “intermediate level skills” and apply for an entry level job, you should have a vastly better chance at securing that entry level position. Or at least getting that position after applying to a more senior position earlier.

I also assume you mean no previous developer experience, but you’ve had a job before right? Not having any kind of job before is usually a big thing to take into consideration for any job, not only a developer position.

I think github could be used as a way to show off your “intermediate skills”, but this would be along the lines of creating your own open source project/library and getting it popular enough for other’s to take note. This of course would be beyond the lines of an entry level developer, but it is also pretty difficult. As not only would you have to identify a problem, and a solution, but you’d have to build, maintain and popularize what-ever you built. This is on the flip of just working hard to learn what you need to get an entry level position.

This is where technical skills don’t help, and “job hunting” skills do.

Namely being able to find the right job, and being able to sell yourself becomes the main goal, rather than just learning enough to get a job. If there’s too many applications for a given job, look for a more specific or niche job posting. And or find a way to stand out from the pack. Sure there’s 1k+ people that applied, but how many of those know ____? Where you fill in the blank with a skill few people would have.

I’d consider these as spam and can be dis-regarded. Its worth keeping in mind if your resume “looks like spam” or possibly even looks “worse than spam” you will have a harder time standing out.

So find other job postings that are less contested, and build your skills/resume to be able to stand out from those that apply.

Good luck, keep learning, keep building :+1:

1 Like
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That was a very specialized reply! thank you Brad, i took notes from it.

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