This is where internships during school help. You gain experience when your employer has few expectations of you. Even my first degree (2 year Associates) required a one semester internship as a degree requirement.
Just lie. There used to be a subreddit of people who would provide professional references, and half of the employers never bother to check references anyway. Send LinkedIn connection requests to everybody's aunt and uncle, because hiring managers subconsciously prefer candidates that are just a few degrees of separation away. Your professors, their spouses, their coworkers who live on the opposite side of the country.
We live in a post-truth reality. Roll with it.
you ain't wrong baby, except no no with that Linkedin shit. Everybody hates getting spammed. Linkedin is the way to advertise that you are a tool.
Use your hobbies and class projects as experience. Don't oversell your abilities; just lie about where you learned shit.
Can attest, don't claim you have mad skills with Excel, when you just know how to sort and do some formulas and such. Even if you get that job, it will crush your soul
"I have made Excel skills."
"So you're good at Excel?"
"No. I am skilled at being mad at Excel."
I’m in a similar situation. Do employers believe that the workforce will never run out of people who have experience if employers never bother to provide and cultivate newbies to start getting experience? Right now, it’s like you can’t get in the club if you haven’t already been in the club. And how are jobs that are labeled as Entry Level requiring applicants to have 5+ years of experience?
And how are jobs that are labeled as Entry Level requiring applicants to have 5+ years of experience?
This is a deliberate psychological ploy by businesses. They're expecting prospective hires to feel that they're "lucky" for being considered despite meeting the obviously bogus job requirements in the hopes that they will be desperate enough if hired to accept insultingly low wages for the position.
What did you go to college for? My buddy got his power engineering and then couldn’t find a job.
BS Cybersecurity. A topic I'm actually interested in. 🥲
Good luck.
Start out doing helpdesk. The job sucks and so does the pay, but it's a foot in the door and where most IT people I know started out (including me)
Can't agree more. Managers normally want to see "professional" work experience. College, courses, certifications only get you so far. Working a year or two as a help desk technician will really push your career forward.
There's also the aspect of the managerial "I had to do it so why should you get to skip to the middle" attitude, which isn't fair but is reality
Do you have any certifications? Keep an eye out for which ones you keep seeing in job postings and work towards any that you don't already have.
That’s my field. Yeah, it can be hard to get your foot in the door, but once you’re in, you’re in. The nice thing is that all the info and experience you need is freely available. Want to show off malware analysis skills? Download a sample, tear it apart, write up your thoughts, and post it in a blog. Link to it in your resume. I’m a hiring manager, and I read those. Is network analysis more your thing? Malware-traffic-analysis.net. Know what we need? People who know what the three major cloud providers’ security logs look like and know when something actually bad is happening, because the default alerts are pretty useless. Same for O365 logs. Sometimes, I feel like our userbase wants to get their accounts compromised.
A community to discuss jobs, whether that's regarding to the search, advice on how to negotiate an offer, or just an open forum to vent.
This is not a place intended for you to post job listings.