For the past year and so many months, I’ve been in a front-end web developer boot camp. It’s self-paced, and for the concepts I know, I feel as though I have a decent grasp on how to use them. Still, based on my failed freelancing attempt and the job requirements I see listed often, it seems like it’ll be a long time until I can get a job.
What I currently know is HTML, CSS, JS. I know some basic git and node. I’m currently learning React and Typescript. I am very certain that this is not enough to land a job, and I would like to know any skills I should know by this point.
When I do have the skills, what is the best way to apply to jobs, and what should I know when applying?
Now my soft skills are 99% of my job but for the first ~8 years it was probably 60% programming and 40% sales, networking, and project management.
It’s a lot of work centered around managing customer expectations, ensuring the effort is remaining in scope as defined in the SOW, status reporting, and requirements gathering
I would say it doesn’t require a business degree only because while I have one, I never went to class so I certainly didn’t learn what was needed for the job in school - that just helped with networking and getting my foot in the door. I would study agile methodology and see what certifications you can find for it / scrum. Once you land the first job in this area it’s all about keeping up to date on technical skills and honing ones soft skills. For my career progression it played out like this:
Years 1-3 : diving deep into the technical side of things and showing off my prowess by tackling increasingly more difficult use cases
Year 4 : learning how to manage a project and what the true concerns of my customers were.
Years 5-7 : learning how to manage a team and how to connect with my team members as everyone is different. During this time I also dove headfirst into code versioning and devops and deployed a self-hosted Gitlab instance, created a devops pipeline, and created a slew of internal tools that helped other work streams besides my own.
Years 8-9: tackling sales efforts and learning how to position all the processes and service offerings I had crafted in the years prior.
Years 9-11(current) : learning how to manage a team of solutions architects in a large tech company that is highly political.
This is incredibly helpful and gives me something to aim for. Some of what you’ve mentioned reminds me of the book “Never Split the Difference.” Are there any resources or tips you’ve found helpful in encouraging teamwork or cohesion within a team? Or was most of the learning on the job and mostly gained through experience?