But I Need Experience To Get A Job
Steven Kneiser
1-minute read
Do you honestly believe
you have zero experience?
I disagree with the very premise of this tired meme:
I need experience to get a job
but I need a job to get experience
The real problem here is
your discomfort with & inability to
communicate your relevant experience
Who said you need a job to get experience?
Don’t gate-keep yourself
out of an industry with no gate-keepers
What are you
…a neurosurgeon?
Give experience, don’t get it
- Try to rebuild something you already use from scratch (no end-to-end tutorials)
- Personal Favorite: find others online looking to try, fail, & learn together. Make it social & recruit others in the same position
- Make it feel legit: buy that domain, or maybe even register a company? (Look at you, CEO)
- Secret Pro-tip: get goofy. Find something non-serious that gets you really excited to share the results with someone (especially if the idea or story behind it is 10x funnier than whatever Frankenstein you go on to build. Don’t underestimate the power of a fun story to cut right through those hesitations getting in your own way of learning)
- Get feedback: actually share this project of fun with them & notice how much their reaction makes you want to tweak it even more
- Repeat until you’ve contributed to a project that you don’t mind sharing with more than 10 people. If you’re really on to something, they might show it to 10 people too. If those new 10 people share it with even more people, then tThat’s not a project anymore: that’s a blossoming business.