How I landed a job in tech industry!

We all do have our doubts about our capabilities...

Being on slippery ground I realized two things - having a mentor is important and equally important is selling yourself to people out there and determining your worth. In the beginning it won't be easy and there are so many questions...who would hire me? my domain is different will it be okay to apply for other field? My college wasn't that great nor we got good exposure to the software field so who would take a chance? I don't have much experience and company wants experience without even providing one! So what would I do? yada yada...

So here is the thing I did to get over these insane self doubting questions.

• Made myself available on demanding social platforms: Twitter, Linkedin
• Next thing: What do I sell and how on these platforms?
• Started my bloghttps://ashwiniag.com, Now the question was: What am I supposed to write? I dont know anything! Self doubting all over again...Don't!

I began with:

Language: Started with basic step, learning a language. I started with python. Solved as many questions to understand the concept crystal clear.

Account: Created an account: aws, github(understood how it works) and slack channels(every issue encountered in tech is answered here and take

away is more than expected, there is lot of learning and good way to build

contacts). All my projects/experiments are on my github.

Blog: Whatever I learned started to post it on blog and tweeted the same.

Task: Assigning and doing the task each day and posting/tweeting it. It helped me to build lot of confidence. More the issues, More I learnt

Better I became. Sometimes I would waste days on same problem which is

not at all productive tried to optimize my time with other task.

Optimizing time and productivity and being sane is must!

Interviews: Attended lot of interviews. At first there was lot of rejections and is demotivating but I realized its only helping me to work on my weak areas and build my confidence.

Applications: Started applying for jobs on platforms like:cutshort,tophire,linkedin,hasjob,angelListetc.. Did this each day in the morning

piously. Keept myself updated. Got interviews/ rejections..made myself known to company.

Ask and build contacts: Ask for the reference, it helped me a lot.

Tweeted for jobs and retweet, and I got One! During this entire process and interviewing I made myself know to people and my caliber. I got the

interviews because of my blog, tweets and activities online related to my

works. It bestowed the confidence about me and my caliber on others. And

thats how I landed on good job as Devops. During my rejection they would

say your blog is good, some would suggest me changes or share some

opinions or ideas and encourage, which actually inspired me to work on

more.

Mentor: They have good industry experience and knowledge to guide. There are times, where I took lot of days to understand one simple task/concept but sitting with mentor accelerated my time of learning. Seeing how they do, what they do, way of understanding an error and... gave me a perspective to understand and improvise myself in better way, faster too. Sometimes I would ask same question numerous times, was little embarrassed for not understanding quickly or some sort of fear. It is okay to feel that but It is extremely important to ask and get clarified.

track: kept the track of what I did/learned through a blog (best way) or a trello board.

PS:

There are people out there who are good and encourage in your career path, all it need is to know what is right. In the beginning I had interviewed in terrible companies and been humiliated a lot, apparently broke my confidence, because I believed this how industry works but it isn't !!! Interviews are suppose to be friendly and welcoming, also takeaway for areas of improvement.