![[0 YoE, Unemployed, Software Engineer, UK] Any advice would be highly appreciated](https://preview.redd.it/jp3d7f9h96tg1.png?auto=webp&s=3eb8000673f710365030ac997c5211bcc9576a68)
[0 YoE, Unemployed, Software Engineer, UK] Any advice would be highly appreciated
Hey everyone!
I have been applying relentlessly for the past 6 months to any graduate SWE / DS / DE positions I could find on LinkedIn, but about 97% of the time I'm hit with "After careful consideration, we regret to inform you...". I understand the market is really tough right now, but I do feel like there's a lot of room for improvement and better positioning of my skills and expertise.
Here's a breakdown of why I believe things are / aren't working out for me, and I just wanted to get some feedback from the actual human beings (a bit tired of always passing my new resume through ChatGPT and hearing "You have solid foundations, but..." advice which is not exactly working). Any critique, advice, suggestions, or thoughts is massively appreciated!
Things causing rejections:
- No tech internship experience
- Third project is weak, outdated, and doesn't have a github repo (unfortunately access was lost)
- No distinction for university (in the UK distinction = 70%+, considered as achieved excellence)
- On a graduate visa with no long-term right to work (would need visa sponsorship)
Things working in my favour:
- Strong thesis project, most of the interviews I got were from scale-up FinTech firms
- Strong second project – good results, uses in-demand industry frameworks
- Relevant and good education (Mathematics + Data Science is rather strong in tech imo)
- Some leadership / work experience is better than nothing and shows teamwork / collaboration / etc.
How I'm changing my strategy & improving my position in the market:
- I'm working on a financial project as an extension to my thesis. I'm planning to incorporate in-demand technologies (e.g. deployment on GCP, Apache Kafka, Spark, sentiment processing, etc.). The logic here is to replace the third project with something useful and "demo-able" that can both trigger ATS with the keywords and look impressive to any human reading
- I'm shifting my strategy to cold applying to smaller tech firms and scale-ups, while trying to get referrals through my uni alumni network (didn't do this before as was anxious to reach out to people). Also a bigger focus on fintech as it seems to get more responses
- I'm trying to find a part-time tech volunteering position. The logic here is it would be a more relevant experience to the industry than tutoring and business analyst. Struggling in this regard as well, but hoping it would be a bit easier to land something
- I have a portfolio website, so I was thinking about writing more blog posts there, but 50/50 here on if it's a good time investment
