Getting your first job without experience

Why everyone asks for experience

Not out of spite. Employers fear not missing knowledge but three things: that you can't work in a team, that you don't finish, and that you don't understand how real development works.

Courses and exercises don't remove those fears: the problem is set, the answer is known, no deadline presses, and nobody depends on the result.

So the job seeker's task isn't "to acquire experience" but to show those three fears don't apply.

What counts as experience besides employment

A team project. The closest available thing to real work. There are other people, code review, agreements, a deadline, and the need to explain decisions.

That's exactly why it gets asked about: it demonstrates what exercises can't.

A finished personal project. The word "finished" is the key one. Half of applicants say "I was building a project"; few say "I built one".

Contributions to open projects. Even small ones. They show you can find your way around someone else's code and submit a change to the rules.

Work for people you know. A site for a relative's business, some automation for a club. That's a real task from a real client.

Adjacent experience. If you're coming from accounting into accounting software, or from logistics into logistics software, your prior work is worth a great deal. That's rarely understood and almost never written on a CV.

Where it's easier to get in

Small companies and agencies. Fewer formalities, more willingness to take someone and grow them. Their stated requirements are more flexible than they look.

Companies where software isn't the product. A development team inside a manufacturer, a bank, a retailer. Less competition.

Internships. A topic of their own, but the most predictable route: experience isn't required by definition.

Areas with less competition. Testing, support, data work, business systems. Worth saying honestly about the last: fewer applicants, and starting pay is no worse.

Hardest of all: a junior developer post at a large well-known company without an internship. Hundreds of applications arrive per opening.

How long it takes

Honestly: usually three months to a year of active searching. Dozens of applications, a handful of replies, a few interviews.

That's the normal course of events, not a sign you're unsuitable. Knowing it in advance helps: people most often give up in the second month, having concluded the problem is them.

What genuinely helps

Applying widely. Not ten hand-picked vacancies but fifty. Matching seventy per cent of the stated requirements is already reason enough.

Not fearing "I don't qualify". Requirement lists are written on the principle of "might as well ask", and people are hired who meet half of them.

Going through people. An application via someone you know always gets read; one from the general pile doesn't.

Keeping a project alive. While searching, keep building. First, you'll have something to talk about. Second, searching with nothing else to do is far more draining.

What to avoid

Waiting until you're "ready". Readiness doesn't arrive. Experience comes on the job, not before it.

Studying instead of searching. One more course feels safer than a rejection. Hence people with five completed courses and not a single interview.

Lying on a CV. An invented year of employment surfaces in the first technical conversation, and that's the end of it.

Downplaying your own projects. People are embarrassed by them, and they're precisely what distinguishes you from a hundred similar applicants.