Things I learned this week.

Before we go into the topic I want to first introduce myself as this is my first blog post on here. I am an aspiring web developer, who aims to be a junior developer by the end of the year. I started my coding journey in Autumn last year when I joined a brilliant non-profit organisation called CodeYourFuture, and today I will publish some thoughts and tips I learnt during the week, which I believe can give a little of help to people who are on the same journey as me.

• Why Soft skills are important?

Just remember this “Hard skills will get you the interview, but Soft skills will get you the job”, this is one of the things I have learned from the people in the industry and thanks for coming to my Ted talk.

But no seriously, Soft skills are skills that relates to your personal skills such as communications skills, teamwork, leadership, open-mindedness and the list goes on.

Enhancing your Soft skills should take the same effort as your Hard skills (technical skills), because when recruiters wanna hire you as a junior, it is not because of your tech skills (as you do not have the experience yet), it is because they want to hire someone who thinks and behaves like a programmer and this is where you can use your Soft skills to demonstrator this, and I heard this directly myself from the senior developers/managers who work in well known companies.

You might be also surprised that leaderships is among those skills that are deemed important for a junior to possess. Well first let me tell you that you do not need to lead a group of developers and mentor them to be regarded as a leader.

Leadership is about learning from your mistakes and taking the necessary steps to overcome challenges, anything that challenges your inner self for the better good is a sign of leadership, deciding to advocate some time to enhance your skills is a sign of leadership, being honest and confident is a sign of leadership.

There are a lot of skills that are categorised under Soft skills signs, quick online search about them will tell you what they are and how to improve them. This link is a page that explores Soft skills more in depth.

• A tip I got on how to get my first dev role.

I got the following advice from a person who works in the recruitment agency,
and what she suggested is to connect with and speak to the right people on LinkedIn.

The best way to utilize this is to speak with people from the internal team, such as “Talent manager", "Head of people", "internal recruiter" "Recruitment manager" "Resourcing advisor".

The method to use is to message/email them directly and make a tailored message for each message/email you send, as it will show them how much interest and effort you are putting in to get a job with them.

Please feel free to share your suggestions or feedback if you wish.