I moved to my current city in 2019 to be with my partner and to work in software. I'd been through a rough year and wanted to get out of my hometown, and I moved without much of a plan. My line of thinking was this:
- It will be difficult to work without a degree, but
- There are a ton of developer positions here and as long as I can get my foot in the door, I'll be good.
I had some money saved up and eventually a small income here. But I had no luck getting any sort of software position. I felt like I was spiraling and applied to less places, but I kept my learning up. I've always been developing, and learning new things, so now I'm confident in my ability to program and learn anything I need, but I've screwed up on multiple fronts:
- I still have no professional software experience, years later
- I started a lot of my own projects instead of contributing to well known, Open Source ones, and
- Most of these projects are bespoke, hard-to-explain, and many are unfinished as I lost motivation after I learned what I needed to learn
I'm a bit defensive, but honestly I'm just ashamed. I now make sure to apply for jobs frequently, working on my resume, but I'm not even getting interviews. In the past, when I've had interviews, they've went quite well, but nothing has come of them.
Things like (hands on) technical support/IT, quality assurance/testing, some customer service roles, etc.
Unfinished projects aren't too big of a deal, but make sure you highlight the relevant ones for the company you're applying for. As an interviewer, if I'm asking you about your project, I'm looking for some area where you have deep understanding, so I can confirm you know stuff and can explain things. It's ok for it to be unfinished, as long as you can talk about why you did x or y, how did this part work, what was missing, what would you do differently.
When you get those kinds of questions, you want to be able to have an answer, and not just blurt out; oh i stopped working on that pretty quickly. It's like when people put a group project on their resume but they didn't do much of the work and didn't understand it. Not a lot to talk about then.
I don't know if Ottowa has a junior/community college system, but it's possible to take some classes for not much money, you might want to consider it. It sounds like you've seen how hard it is to get your foot in the door without a credential, so you may be motivated to get one. Working something IT or something during the day and taking a class or two at night isn't easy and doesn't get you a degree very fast, but it puts you on a path.
You should get a few interviews out of them each month. It's much better than sending out applications, as usually someone who is making the hiring decision is contacting you.
You can also try asking for referrals. Many people would gladly do so since they get a bonus if you're hired. A referral makes the company recruiters look at you.
Until you have a first job it's hard for your resume to show that you are a high probability candidate (remember in a job application system your resume gets screened either by algorithm or non-technical recruiters). So you have to think about ways to be noticed.
