I’ve a 6-8 months of time to get a job, but no employable skills, no money what should I do?
First, decide which job role you want to target. Once you do, research the skills required for that position and start learning them. If money is a concern, there are plenty of free resources available online. freeCodeCamp itself provides many excellent free courses.
The thing is I want to go into AI but I have no idea where to start, what to look for, and I’ve limited time,
So, in my case I want something that will get me a job in the given time and then I transition into AI,
it doesn’t matter whether the skills I learn now should help me transition later, I just want to get a job and save some money in case I have to do a paid course or to buy a new laptop for learning purposes.
I don’t suggest paid courses. I self taught myself with FCC and other resources and I’m actually going to become an ai intern (just gotta pass one more interview and I got directly scouted straight from the CEO herself and this is my dream company). If you want to do ai then you have to learn Python and I guess learn to work with APIs. I’m also broke with nothing so you def don’t need to spend anything to get a dream job.
Welcome to the forum @Dhawal
First, I’d challenge the assumption that you have no employable skills.
Write down a skill of transferable skills you have. You can apply these skills in any job, sector, or industry. Search online if you need to, and write down as many things as you can, then organise them into categories. Do the same thing for the non-transferable skills list.
The AI field offers several career pathways based on your background, mathematical interest, and technical skills. The primary paths span from building foundational algorithms to applying models to solve business challenges.
Find out what interests and passions you have, figure out how to incorporate them into your career.
Six months is not a lot of time to learn skills and land a job, especially when you are competing against people who have spent years learning and training.
If money is the main focus for now, ask family and friends if they can look out for job opportunities on your behalf. The work maybe short term, and not in the field you are aiming for, but you can build up a network of contacts and spend your spare time learning the skills you need. There are lots of free course available online, so you don’t need to spend money on fancy courses. Most important is building a portfolio of your work, as proof matters more to recruiters than certificates.
Can you please share what courses on FCC you did for that AI Job
I understand it will take a lot more time than 6 months to land an AI job, Back when I was in highschool learning Excel could easily land you entry-level jobs, I’m aiming for something like that in 6 months, something that makes most amount of money after learning for 6 months, then transition into AI.
Tbh all I did was the front end courses and the backend and then trying to get more familiar with python. They have that entire full stack track but I don’t think that’s really directly ai related. I actually went into coding not knowing what I wanted to do- but I ended up really loving making websites. So I wanted to do websites but after liking my work I got offered the ai internship. Now I wouldn’t say this is typical of an experience as I didn’t even wanna do ai at all before. But you can do some research for free resources yourself. I remember one leader/mod here saying they found ai courses but I can’t remember which provider it was.
The thing is I want to go into AI but I have no idea where to start, what to look for, and I’ve limited time,
I think there’s two parts to this.
- “go into AI” could mean many things, I think you aren’t sure about this either
- you have limited time to do this
Practically you could go into AI most easily by knowing how to leverage existing AI tools to increase productivity. For example, you could pretty quickly go be a well versed vibe coder and use a multitude of tools + tokens to execute some developer tasks. However this costs money on your end (AI/tokens are not free) and you will have a hard time finding a job doing this, because anyone with a bunch of money/tokens can and will be able to do the same thing with minimal knowledge.
But most of the time “getting into AI” would be more in line with getting a well paying job at an AI company and building the actual systems used by people.
This requires more than 6 months of time and isn’t something someone can just pivot into in a short period without a significant starting point. For example a data scientist with a degree in statistics would be a pretty good starting point to move into AI/data-specific AI.
This brings me back to the second point, where you have limited time. You could just spend all that limited time learning vibe coding and learning how to use AI to accomplish something, but that leaves you will skills that are easily learned/applied, which directly leans toward these jobs not existing.
There’s no rule that every job has a path that is achievable in 6 months. For example, you can’t be a doctor in 6 months. You could do data entry with 6 months of training on excel.
I’ve a 6-8 months of time to get a job, but no employable skills, no money what should I do?
So this brings me back to the start.
- if you have no employable skills, you need some
- if you have no money, and need money, you’d need to do this
Skills are investing in yourself, but if you need money now and don’t have much “investment” into your current skills, I’d highly recommend just getting any job to keep you alive, then take some of that pay/time you have left over to invest into yourself now. A 6 month plan where you make no money with hopes it pays off later might exist in some extreme case, but odds are its just too risky compared to spending a month or so getting a job then using that job to survive as you invest more time over a longer period to build up invest-able skills you can use later.
Good luck, keep learning, keep building and keep asking questions!
What skills after learning can get me a job in 6 months?
It depends on how you do your research in coding.