110 Why Do Employers Ask For Work Experience For Entry-Level Jobs?

Why do employers ask for work experience for an entry-level job? Why don't they allow people with no experience to apply? Why does no one want a new developer with no experience? These are the questions we are going to answer in today's episode of Dev Questions.

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey. Join us each episode as we tackle the questions you are asking about a career in software development, understanding the industry, and new technology. If you're just starting out or you want to grow stronger as a developer, this is the place to get your questions answered. Now, here's your host, expert developer and online educator, Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

Why do employers ask for work experience for entry-level jobs? Why don't they allow anyone to apply, not just those who've already gotten a job? How do you get work experience when no one will give you work experience? This is the question we're going to tackle on today's episode of Dev Questions. And we're going to focus in on why the employer is asking for work experience even for an entry-level job. So let's get started. Let's talk about why employers ask for that work experience. First off, if you graduate from college, let's say you go the quote unquote traditional route and you go from high school to college, you get your four-year degree in computer science, maybe that emphasis on programming or something like that. And then you go to apply for a programming job. Why is it that the employer says, well, no, you don't have any work experience. We're not going to hire you for this entry-level job. Well, in my experience, now I'm going to give you a very unscientific percentage here. This is just my estimation based upon what I've seen. But my estimation is that recent college graduates know about 3% of what they need to in order to work in the real world. Now, how do I where I base that on? Well, I've taught a lot of recent college graduates. I've brought a lot of recent college graduates up to speed in jobs, and I have found that they just don't know what they need to know to actually do work in the real world. Let's talk about the college experience for just a second here. When you go to college, you are tested. And so you have tests with true and false and fill in the blanks and remember these terms and maybe a little bit of writing code, but that's not how the real world works. Your employer doesn't give you an assignment that is multiple choice. Your employer will give you an assignment that is build this application. Now, if you've gone through college, think back through how many times did you actually build a full application in college? A real application, not just pieces of one, not just a little thing that was an experiment or something you copied from somebody else or a real application that did real work. Probably not very many, if any. In fact, your college experience, if you go to college, it's going to be very little to do with programming, even if you are a programming major of some type. Because you have the general, uh general credits that you're not normally supposed to take, like uh literature and music appreciation and all the other things that kind of round you out as an individual. Those aren't bad, but they're not development focused. And then when you actually get into your field, you may be taking a class from a professor who hasn't actually done it in the real world or hasn't for a very, very long time. And then you're take reading out a book that had to be published and approved and gone through the process that usually takes about three years to get into the classroom. Well, three years ago is a long time in development world. So all these things add up to a not great experience for the person learning, because what they learn isn't what they necessarily need in the real world. Yes, there's a lot of theory that is practical. Um the ideas behind it they learn are can be great, but often when you come out of a college experience, you just aren't prepared to jump right in and start contributing to an organization. So there's a lot of work that has to go into building you up. And this is one of the major reasons why employers ask for work experience. Because whether or not you have a degree, whether or not you have multiple degrees, master's degree, doctor degree, doctorate, doesn't matter. Whether or not you have those, what's going to be important is do you have work experience? Because those initial couple years of work experience will teach you the other 97%. Now, you won't be perfect, you won't be know it all yet. You're still an entry-level developer after those two years, but you will have rounded out your skills in working in the real world. So, what employers are doing is saying, I don't want to train you and make and go through that process, I want somebody else to do it. That's why I want some work experience. So that's one thing is that you're not really experienced when you come out of college or when you even graduate a boot camp or have taken stuff online and learned from people like me. Just because you have seen something done, just because you know about certain things, just because you've built a couple of demos doesn't prepare you for working in the real world. Now, when you get that first experience, so let's say you do find a company that says, sure, we'll hire you with no experience, that building you up to and give up getting you up to speed is going to be expensive for that company. It's not just a free ride. When they pay you, let's just say they pay you a, in the US, pretty entry-level salary of $35,000, $40,000 a year. All right. So if they're paying you $40,000 a year, that is about $800,000, $900 a week. Well, how many weeks is it going to be before you start contributing to the organization? Well, you're not going to contribute right away. You have to learn how things go. And so maybe the first three, four, five weeks, you're doing nothing. And then when you start doing something, yeah, you're making contributions, but they're tiny. And they could have been done easily by someone already on the staff. So it's going to be a few months before you start making a real impact. So you start seeing five, $10,000, $15,000 that an employer has paid to you without getting any benefit back. But even worse is that you're not going to work on your own. You're going to ask questions of the other developers, which is a good thing. You should do that. Please do that. But when you do, you're taking time away from what those developers could be doing. And so that's even more of a cost. So the employer has to think through how long do I allow this to go on before I start seeing a return on my investment? Because eventually, if you stick with that company, you will become a contributing member of the team. And you will start giving back more than you cost, hopefully. Well, at that point, you're going to start paying back the time that they've invested in you. But that's all that can be a long time. And that investment isn't an overnight investment. It's sometimes a year or two-year investment before you start seeing real return on that investment. The problem is that people don't stay in jobs very long anymore. They tend to bounce around. So that first employer, maybe they get you up a speed and they get you to the point where you're finally returning some value for what you cost them, and then you find a better offer somewhere else. Well, they spent all that time and investment and didn't really get all the value they wanted to out of it. And they may not even have paid back their investment in you. So that's why employers are a little shy to do that because they don't want to be the one that gets stuck paying for essentially your education. So that's another reason why employers are a little shy to just say, yeah, I'll hire you with no education. Also, if I'm sorry, no experience. So also, if you have no experience, how do you separate yourself from the thousands of other developers who also have no experience? As an employer, think of it from their side, how do they choose who to hire? How do they know if you're gonna be a good developer or not? If you have no experience to show, how do they know if you're gonna be the right person for the job or not? That's a big question. And it's one that is really hard to answer. So sometimes having experience shows off that you stuck around, that your employer liked you, that you grew over time. These are the things that will help an employer say, Yes, I think you might be a good fit for our organization. I think you might be a good investment to keep going in our organization. So those are some of the reasons why employers don't just ask for no experience. They have to have some kind of criteria to hire people, and they often will use that as a way to get past that first hurdle of training you. Now, what can you do? Because, okay, sure, you you understand their plight, but at the same time, if you have no experience, then how do you get experience? Well, there's a few things. First of all, practice is really important. Whenever you learn something, practice it. You've heard me say that's in almost every video I've ever made, but it's so important. Because if you watch something, it it feels like you know it. But until you've actually built it, you don't have that experience. And you don't really know, you haven't verified that what you know is really the truth. So you have to build something with it. But with that, having built something, you can then tell an employer, hey, I've built these five things with that technology. And here's what I think about it. All right. Number two, build a portfolio. Build something that shows off what you can do. Again, if an employer is going to take the risk of hiring someone with no work experience, they need some way to differentiate you from the rest of the crowd. Being able to show off what you can do is really important. Just saying, I can do all these things, that's not good enough. I've had lots of people tell me they can do everything. And it turns out they really couldn't. They just watched tutorials on those things. They know how to actually use them. So make sure that you show off what you can do in a portfolio. Show, don't just tell. Now, also, build something real. Pick anything, build something real, make it open source or not, doesn't really matter. Build something. Be able to tell an employer, hey, maybe I don't have work experience in a corporation, but I've been building this app for the past two years and I've been able to sell it. I put it in the App Store, I put it on iOS or the Android store, or I have it on my website for sale, or it's a website itself, and I've been I've been using that for this purpose. That shows off that you have experience building applications. That's important. That's not exactly the same, but it is pretty close to regular work experience. And finally, build relationships. I know this is hard for some people where they really feel like they want to be on their own. They don't want to have this interaction, they don't want to go out in the crowd, they don't feel comfortable building relationships, but it's important. The more you build relationships, the more you can rely on those relationships as a give and take, as a help each other out thing. Join a local user group. Get to know people because when you need a job, they may think of you before they just open it up to everybody. So building relationships is also really helpful as a new developer and as an existing and growing developer as well. All right. So hopefully you have a better picture of why employers don't just hire anybody. They have to think through how they hire people in order to get the most return on their investment. But at the same time, hopefully you have some ideas on how to improve your odds of getting a job, your first job, especially, but getting a job where you can show off what you can do and you can prove what you can do so that employers can understand who you are as a developer and hopefully take a risk on you. All right. Thanks for listening. And as always, I am Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Dev Questions. Tim is committed to making it easier for you to become a developer. If you would like to help make more content like this possible, please like, subscribe, rate, and share Dev Questions. You can also send your questions to questions at IamTimcorey.com. Until next time, remember, you are too smart and your time too valuable to waste it making all the mistakes Tim did. When you're ready to learn to think and code like a professional developer, head over to imtimcore.com and enroll in a course.