Will’s Blog

So, you’ve just finished your final exam for the entire course. What’s next on your plans?

Is it, oh, I want to travel, or, I want to take a holiday for a few months, and i’ll look into a job maybe next year.

Or maybe your first reaction is “I don’t know”?

And then there is the other bunch of students, who do know what they want! They want a job, a job in the field they graduated in.

After completing my final exam in November last year (12 months ago!), my search for a suitable job IT job started.

I knew what I wanted, at that point in time I was fairly confident that I would get a job, it was just a matter of when.

At this point it was mostly brushing up my resume, getting an academic transcript from the University, and applying for any jobs I saw on it.seek.com.au and careerone.com.au as well as the university’s careers website (MONSEACS) that my skillset seemed to match. Got a handful for replies, but none were promising.

A month passed, and it was time for my annual Sydney trip with the family. (The whole of my mums’ family lives over in Sydney, so every year since I was born, and probably before that too, my parents and a few of my other cousins/uncles/aunts will travel by car or bus to Sydney for at least a week or two).

When I arrived back in Melbourne, I started to reply to some of the questions in the aus-dotnet mailing list. I’d been on it for a good year prior to graduation. I had read and learnt much from it.

I decided that since I had so much time on my hands i’d read through the questions and reply to it if I knew the answer, or do some research into that topic so I could learn about a possible solution (hey, I was bored at that time, ok!).

And at times by the time I’d found out an answer, there hadn’t been any replies, so I’d just post a reply from what i’d just learnt. It was a great way for me to get more familiar with the framework, and do something constructive with my time when not doing job hunting related activities.

By chance I happened to also come across the PDC slidedecks just prior to exams and I had started to download as many as possible.

I think I may either have come across them via a link from aus-dotnet, or via a blog. Not entirely sure, it may have been via a PDC ’03 blog site that I found via the aus-dotnet list.

I did read some of them, but not all before exams (had to study, didn’t want to be totally distracted).

Actually, I ended up going through all of them eventually. I still have them on one of my backup CDs. (Backed everything up onto multiple CDs after I got the laptop!). I also attended my first MDNUG meeting about that time. Nigel Watson, who had come to Monash Uni as a guest lecturer several times had told me about MDNUG, and encouraged me to go along if I wanted to learn more about .NET. That first MDNUG meeting I attended was a presentation by Chris Garty about the PDC. My first thought? Cool, I’d just gone through most of those slides!

A few months passed, more rejections. The closest I actually got to an interview was a phone interview. At this point, it was mid February already, I was getting worried about whether or not i’d get a job. I’d started looking at my options.

What did I consider? I considered going back to studying and go for my Masters. Also looked into the possibility of perhaps teaching tutorials at Uni and look for work at the same time. The final option was to look for a job interstate (Sydney in fact!).

In the end, I ended up applying for two tutoring positions. The first one was to tutor the CSE3211 subject (Handheld Applications and Operating Systems — basically, it is about developing apps for mobile devices. both web based and OS based), and the second one was to tutor CSE3420 (Developing Graphical WWW apps in Java). I decided on those two because they were the subjects I enjoyed the most and did quite well in both.

Just after applying, I had gotten a positive response from a potential employer via a telephone call. At the conclusion of the call, I had been invited to be interviewed.

And eventually, after another 2 interviews, I got the job (and that’s where I am now!).

I started attending MDNUG meetings regularly at that point. And I had started to get to know some of the regulars. I introduced myself, and told most of the people I’d met that I’d just graduated.

Most responses to me saying i’d just graduated was “so, are you working? or?”. My general response was that I was.

I’d even gotten a few “if you’re not working, give me a call” type of responses. Actually, I recall one instance of this at the March security conference. One guy who told me he owned his own company handed me his company card after finishing talking to him. This was during lunch, so we parted ways soon afterwards (he went back to the IT Pro series of presentations, while I continued on with the MSDN presentations).

Over the months since graduation I’ve noticed due to my responses earlier in the year to questions posted on the aus-dotnet people have started to notice me posting responses to questions once in awhile. I respond much less now days, due to heavier work load. (And more blogging).

That has lead to several individuals tell me that they’ve noticed that I post a lot. I actually hadn’t realised that fact. Always thought I could just post and nobody would really notice.

Not that being noticed is a bad thing, it’s a good thing (generally), if you’ve been noticed for the right reasons.

I think any graduate, or student with time on their hands should get involved with their local developer community and respond to those questions that they see people posting.

If you don’t know where your local developer community is, do a websearch, and i’m sure you’ll find it! Or go seek out one of your past lecturers, i’m sure they would have contact with some individuals who are involved in usergroups. Or even try contacting one of your previous guest lecturers (don’t be afraid, i’m sure they will all be more than willing to give a handy weblink/contact where possible).

As a graduate, getting involved and networking with your peers is definately an important first step.

I know i’ve made many valuable friendships over the course of the past few months attending MDNUG, which subsequently led me to MXPEG via Chris Garty.

When, as a graduate you have networked with many individuals and they know that you are on the lookout for work, rest assured if they hear of an opportunity, and they have your email address handy, they will forward on that opportunity to you.

Believe me, it really does help having friends/relatives in the industry. My cousin actually found a job opportunity for me, but it was in Sydney and it was doing J2EE stuff that I hadn’t done before. And aside from the other fact of already being employed, so I declined the opportunity.

Sometimes there are some opportunities that don’t get advertised at all. But the employee that comes aboard, came aboard due to an internal referree, or a was a friend-of-a-friend.

How do you get to know of those non-advertised positions? You network, and you will find out!

Have you seen those advertised average job salaries for graduates? Well, don’t be too disappointed if your first job isn’t very close to it. Believe me, as a graduate with no real world programming experience, you are almost worth nothing. It is a gamble by the employer to employ you. Which is why many companies these days require you to sit various forms of tests as well as multiple job interviews. That is to filter through the quality of all potential candidates.

Hey, if they are to offer a graduate $36,000 (that’s the average salary in Australian Dollars for an IT graduate… it is a figure I remember seeing during the careers fair last year!), they may as well try to get the best they can, right?

It is not to say that some of the best may fall through that quality filter. But it is a method that generally works well for the employer.

Finally, before I goto bed, one final piece of advice for IT graduates, or graduating students who are either job seeking, or are to be graduating. If you have a blog, especially one which shows your passion for your field, do post a link to it. The employer will likely check it.

On your blog page, also include links to previous projects where you could illustrate some of the large projects (such as the final year project) as well as an extra large link (maybe slightly larger sized font) which says “Resume. This is where you can put up an extended version of your resume (minus some personal details you’d prefer not to share with every single person on the web. This includes address/mobile phone, as some individuals are paranoid about posting these details on the web).

When I applied for jobs, I’d always include a link to my domain. At the domain I’d included a page dedicated to my final year project, and made a few screenshots available on there. As well as a page dedicated to my resume.

During my interview, the interviewer actually mentioned that he’d seen my website. Which meant that it did work

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 4th, 2004 at 11:42 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.