5 reasons why junior developers fail to land a job

Top 5 reason:

• Money expectations
• Unskilled
• Wrong Market
• Bad CV (not visually)
• Quick expectations

Money Expectations

First things you all need to understand is that even tho you’re somewhat skilled you still won’t be valuable to the employer. In a sense you’re just a liability

Keeping that in mind, ask yourself what should you be paid reasonably. .

What I’ll suggest to all juniors is to figure out how much money you really need, what are your expenses? How much do you really need to survive?

Some people living with families don’t pay as much rent as ones living alone, or ones who have their own own family.

Once you know the number you can figure out what’s the best way to achieve your goal. How many hours you’d need to work. If you can even earn that much based on what you’ve learned so far..

In the end you’ll come to one conclusion, that a ‘junior’ position is simply a trap. You’ll need to forget about the title and ask yourself you can do the job or not. Would they even hire you for free? (not if you’re not skilled)

Unskilled

You’re simply unskilled.

Even juniors need to be competent. A person who ends up getting a job is just slightly better than all other juniors.

Those who’re rejected forget that they have to be really skilled and that there’s completion out there.

Competent people get hired, incompetents don’t.

Skilled people get hired, those lacking skills blame how junior roles require lots of skills.

So who’s skilled enough? Anyone whose experience and work starts to mirror the real life work is skilled enough and has more chances of landing the job. How does your work look like?

Wrong Market

Getting a junior Rust Developer is not same as getting a junior Frontend Developer job.

Junior positions in different languages require different levels of experience. Some languages won’t even have junior positions.

To make your life slightly easier you should pick a language with many junior positions and with lower entry level requirements for example PHP, Python, Javascript, CSS etc.., these will have more competition but you’ll have more opportunities.

Do not waste your time getting in a field with so few junior positions where thousands are competition for single position.

Bad CV (not visually)

If there’s one thing that automatically makes a CV bad is empty or unimpressive experience section.

ChatGPT and other people can review your CV but if you have no experience there’s not much they can do besides filling it with meaningless words.

Employers start off with experience section, if it’s bad they move to next CV.

A person who has experience will mostly have a good CV. Even if it’s not best looking CV it’ll still be very impressive.

Next time you blame bad CV for rejection ask yourself if it’s a problem with how it looks or that you have nothing valuable to put in your CV.

Wrong Expectations (too quick)

One of the most naive mistakes you can make when trying to achieve anything in life is to think in days or weeks.

Nothing happens in weeks or days. We all know it but we won’t accept it.

Learning a new skill and becoming competent enough to land a job is years of struggle and practice. Anyone who’s ever tried (you too) to learn anything worthwhile will tell you it takes years to get somewhere.

It’s no different with web dev. All I can tell you is to make long term plans so you can build a portfolio that displays long term commitment and speaks for itself. Work done over a weekend is a joke. There’s so much you can do in couple hours, image what you could build if you worked for a year? How would your work look like? Be realistic.