Getting an IT Job When You're Starting Out
Most people applying for IT positions have no idea what they're actually signing up for. I watched a friend of mine go through this process and it was painful to observe. You submit resumes into black holes, you take online assessments that barely reflect the actual work, and by the time you get an interview, you're exhausted. I learned some hard things along the way, so here is what actually works. If you know someone like Scott who is actively seeking a role in IT, the first thing to understand is that the traditional application funnel is broken. Sending a generic resume through a company portal has roughly a two percent response rate. I tested this across dozens of submissions when I was entering the field. It does not work at scale. The workaround I found is much more specific. Instead of applying cold, identify the actual team you would be joining, find the hiring manager or a senior engineer on that team, and send a short message that references something concrete they are working on. A GitHub repo, a blog post, a conference talk, something real. This alone doubles your interview callback rate in my experience. It takes more effort per application, maybe twenty minutes per target instead of three, but the return is significantly better.
I should note a common failure mode here. Some people send those messages and immediately attach their resume or ask for a job. That reads as transactional and gets ignored. The message needs to ask a genuine question about their work first. Build the conversation. The job request comes naturally after.
What Actually Matters on an IT Resume
Your resume should not list every technology you have ever encountered. I see resumes that claim proficiency in JavaScript, React, Node, Python, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, SQL, MongoDB, and ten other things. Recruiters discard these immediately because they read as padding. You cannot claim deep expertise in fourteen areas. Nobody does. Pick three areas you can talk about for an hour without preparing. Put those first. For the rest, group them honestly under "Additional Skills" or similar. This does not hide your breadth, it just signals where your actual competence lies. One counter-intuitive thing I learned: the project section matters more than the skills section for entry-level roles. A well-described project that shows you solved a real problem with constraints will outweigh a longer skills list any day. I once passed a candidate over another who had more certifications simply because the first person could walk me through their project decisions in detail. The second person listed five cloud certs but could not explain why they chose a particular architecture for their capstone project.
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The Assessment Stage
Technical assessments in IT hiring are often poorly designed. You will get questions about edge cases that nobody encounters in day-to-day work, or you will be asked to write code in an environment that does not match anything you have used. I once spent forty-five minutes debugging a coding platform issue during an assessment and realized the problem was with their test runner, not my code. I moved on. It taught me to check the environment first, not assume the fault is mine. For practical preparation, focus on the fundamentals that actually show up. Data structures basics, basic SQL joins, reading error logs, and configuring a firewall rule or a DNS record if the role involves infrastructure. These are the things that separate people who can do the work from people who have only studied theory.
Interview Dynamics
IT interviews often include a systems design component even for junior roles. They want to see how you think, not whether you memorized a template. I had an interviewer once ask me to design a URL shortening service for a startup with limited budget. The right answer was not the most scalable one. It was the one that acknowledged the constraints, picked a simple solution, and explained when you would move away from it. Showing that you understand trade-offs matters more than picking the "correct" architecture. A pitfall I see repeatedly is candidates who either stay too vague or go too deep too fast. Start with a one-paragraph overview of your approach, then expand each part only if the interviewer asks. This keeps the conversation structured and shows you can communicate technical ideas clearly, which is something many hiring managers explicitly value but rarely test directly.
Salary and Expectations
Entry-level IT positions vary wildly in pay depending on the sector. A startup might offer less base salary but equity that means nothing if the company fails. A government contractor offers stability and benefits but lower growth. I picked stability early on and it worked for me, but I know people who took the startup route and benefited from it. There is no universal right answer here. What is useful is knowing your minimum acceptable number before any negotiation happens. I wrote mine down and did not enter any discussion without it. When I offered a range instead of a fixed number, I left money on the table because the employer naturally anchored low. This is a small adjustment that had a real impact on my first two years. If you are struggling to find openings that match your current skill level, consider contracting or freelance work first. It is harder to land initially but it builds the experience portfolio that full-time roles require. I started with two month-long contracts that paid less per hour than the full-time role I eventually took, but they gave me references and concrete deliverables that made the later interview significantly easier.
The process is rarely smooth. You will get rejected for reasons you never learn about. You will apply to roles that were already filled internally before the posting went live. These are normal and not personal. The people who succeed are the ones who keep refining their approach based on feedback they actually receive, not the ones who blast out identical applications and wait for results.
