When I was in the process of learning web development, I was always thinking to myself: “Am I ready to start applying for jobs”, “How many things do I need to know before I start applying for jobs”, “When should I start applying for jobs”. These are probably one of the most important questions in your web development career and ones most people struggle with.
These questions mainly focus on the people who are self-taught web developers but also can help people who’ve learned programming in college or in some different way.
Why Should You Ask Yourself If You Are Ready to Apply For Jobs
If you are not thinking about applying for jobs, you won’t get a job, it’s that simple but a lot of people get that wrong. They think that they need to just keep learning and jobs will come or something like that and that’s not how things work. You need to always ask yourself if you are ready or you’ll never be ready.
Starting applying for jobs is one very brave decision and not all people are brave enough to do it, but they need to or they will be stuck in learning new things and newer getting anything out of that. There is one exception and that’s when you’re building your own product like a website or app or something else, then you can get away without actually applying for jobs because you’ve just created a job for yourself.
Front-end Developer Jobs
Not all jobs take equal time to learn them. For the front-end development jobs, you should start applying as soon as you learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and have a few real websites built with them.
You probably know that a lot of companies use JavaScript frameworks, which may keep you away from applying if you don’t know them, and what will you do, you will start learning that framework, once you finish that, that job may not be open anymore. My recommendation would be to apply to jobs that you don’t feel 100% qualified, because there is no job that you are 100% qualified for, no one is.
Let’s say that the job requires the knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, CSS and React and 2 years of experience in that fields, but you only know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and have only 1 year of experience. In my opinion, you should apply, because you can learn React while you are working there or when they see that you are not that familiar with react, they may give you some other position or you won’t use React at all. Come on, the worst thing that can happen is that they reject you.
Back-end Developer Jobs
In terms of back-end development jobs, things are a little different in my opinion. If you are applying for development jobs, which only require back-end technologies like Python, Django, PHP, Laravel or something else, you should probably know those technologies.
But, there are a lot of situations where the job requires a back-end technology like Django, Python’s framework for web development, and also some front-end technologies like HTML and CSS. If you have a job offer like that and you only know Python you should apply because HTML and CSS are very easy to learn, but if you don’t know Python and only know HTML and CSS then you maybe not apply and rather look for some front developer jobs, where you’ll have much bigger chances.
Full-Stack Developer Jobs
Full-stack development jobs are probably the most intimidating ones because they require you to have the most amount of knowledge, but in the truth, it’s not like that. A lot of people apply for the full-stack development job and end up doing only the back-end or the front-end for the most time.
The point is that there are rare cases where you will be only doing the jobs that you’ve applied for, in most of the cases you will be doing a little bit of front-end and a little bit of back-end, and that’s also true for front-end and back-end only jobs.
So let’s say that a job requires the knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, Django and React and you only know HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Python. If the situation is like that you should apply, you will have time to learn Django and React on that job and also what I’ve said before, you probably won’t do those exact things on that job.
If you aren’t familiar with the thing above and you want to learn to code, here are some courses which you can use:
- For learning Web Development: The Web Developer Bootcamp
- For Learning to create mobile apps: The Complete Android N Developer Course
- For learning to create desktop games: The Ultimate Guide to Game Development with Unity 2019
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Conclusion
For the end, you need to know that there are rare cases where you will be working the job that is the exact same as the one you’ve applied for, you will be probably working a little bit of everything. And in terms of applying, you should apply for jobs that you feel half qualified at least.
I hope that I have helped you with this article. If you liked this article, make sure to share it with your friends.
Also, if you think that I have missed something or you have any other questions, be sure to post your questions in the comments or send me an email at [email protected], I will be happy to answer them.