We all know that to get a job, you need experience.
But to get experience, you need a job… LOL. It’s the classic chicken-and-egg problem for students and early-career professionals.
Today, I’ll share my favorite ways to get real experience before your first official job — ways that go beyond just theory and help you build a real-world portfolio.
🚀 Hackathons
Hackathons are a fantastic place to find a team or a project you can work on. Even if the project doesn’t make money or win a prize, you gain something far more valuable: experience.
Depending on the type of hackathon, it’s also a great opportunity to learn from more experienced developers and to network with like-minded peers. You build, you learn, you connect — triple benefits in one event.
🛠 Pet Projects
But not another fancy, useless ToDo app that’s just sitting in your GitHub.
Treat your pet project like a mini-startup. Try to get real users — peers, friends, classmates — and even better, talk to them like they’re clients. It’s surprisingly achievable to get 100–200 users if your app solves a real problem.
And that’s the most important part: your project needs to solve an actual pain point, not just reinvent the wheel for the thousandth time.
💼 Join a Startup
Almost every university today has some kind of accelerator, incubator, or community for students who want to build something.
You don’t need to be the founder. You don’t need the next billion-dollar idea. You just need to remember one thing: every founder needs developers.
So join an existing student startup or early-stage project at your university and gain hands-on experience building something real. The learning curve will be steep, but it will teach you more than most classes ever will.
At the end of the day, it is not about what you did:
It is about how you describe it in your CV!
If you need a CV review, reach out to me on LinkedIn 🔮
If you want to read more about Job Hunting as a Student, join my channel 🚀
