One of the first comments that appeared said “‘How to break into the industry’ should be about how to get that job at IBM, and not what you did after you got it. Or am I missing something?”

After a bit of reflection, I realized that Stefan was completely right! I had skipped over a vital time in the developer’s journey: how to land your first developer job.

Today I want to address this gap and give you five tips on landing your first developer job.

I want to preface this post with the caveat that I was very privileged in my job search. I completed an internship at IBM and from there was offered a role internally at IBM. I did not have to apply for a multitude of jobs to land my first developer job.

Prior to landing a job with LogMeIn (my second role) and subsequently at Spotify, I applied for as many jobs as I possibly could. I did not hear back from nine-out-of-ten companies that I applied for and I struggled to determine why. I had landed my first job without much effort, why was I having so much trouble landing a second job?

The following tips have come out of my struggle to land a role and I hope they help any developer out there struggling to find their first or second role.

Have A Unique & Complete Resume.

Let’s be honest: landing a job interview is difficult in-and-of-itself. We always discuss how anxiety-inducing the technical interview process is but we don’t often discuss how difficult it is to even get an interview in the first place.

When applying for your first role it can be intimidating to know which roles to apply for. Do you apply for a junior developer role? Do you apply for an entry-level developer role? Often the job requirements don’t perfectly align with what you deem your skillset to be, so you have two options: apply only to roles which you feel tightly align with your skillset or apply to all roles you think you generally fit into.

Regardless of which option you choose one thing is certain: you must have a stand-out resume to get noticed. Recruiters see hundreds of resumes and only spend about 7.4 seconds on average reviewing resumes.

A few tips for having a notable resume include:

Use a fun resume design to stand out from the other candidates Prioritize the most important information at the top List your contact information at the top Don’t include a photo List what direct impact you had on the success of a project in your work experience bullet points Include quantitative data points to back up your work experience “so what” statements I won’t be diving into the nuances for creating a technical resume, but I did create a full course with LinkedIn Learning that you can check out for more details! Here’s what my resume looks like! Remember, we’re in a creative industry so you have a bit of freedom when designing your resume!