Question regarding job requirements

Career Advice
1

Hi !

I’ve been working pretty consistently on learning more than just html and css since September 2018. Along the way, I learned enough about node.js and express to get an api running and am currently building a portfolio project with the MERN stack (without the R, need to learn that next).

Thing is, There are a lot of job postings in my area (live around Montreal) but all of them mention either the need to have anything between 1-7 years of work experience, technologies I have never used (Angular, Webpack, Docker… etc) or even entirely different languages (PHP). I have quite a bit of experience in C# so php shouldn’t be that hard to learn but it feels like the more I learn to get a job, the more I need to learn to get a job and that’s excluding all those “You need a computer science degree” postings.

What exactly should I do ? Learn React, get a good grip on it and start applying for jobs even though I don’t have a lot of experience with it or should I keep learning new stuff like Angular or even php ? Can I apply on a job asking for php if all I know about is JS ? Do you really need to know about every single tech mentioned in the postings ?

So many questions I know. I really want to get a job in development but it seems to be the more I climb the taller the mountain seems to be.

2

I recommend taking the time to become well-versed in a few (or at least one) languages/libraries that interest you rather than trying new ones just for the sake of appealing to employers. I did the same but if you can’t talk in depth about what you’ve built with the things you learned, employers aren’t going to be impressed. Also job requirements are crap, I was reached out to on LinkedIn by a recruiter about a tech support job who ended up recommending me for a software engineer position and the job requirements in no way reflected my 0 years of experience and non-college grad background. I decided to be very open during the interview about what I did and didn’t know, including not being well versed in a skill they said was important to the job. However, I think talking about how I built my React projects from scratch and how much I loved using Hooks (in detail) secured the job. They want to see that you’re dedicated to coding and not just the job search. Frankly I felt like a fake until I decided to just embrace what I find interesting about tech instead of following those “top 10 questions to ask during an interview” lists. Hope that helps.

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