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Work Experience
You don't need to have had a job in tech to have work experience.
If you've had a job in any field, you have work experience, and you should list it. You probably don't need to go into a ton of detail about your role as a Bank Teller, but you should list it.
Hiring managers still want to know that you're responsible enough to hold down a job. You can also communicate soft skills like hard work, responsibility, and good communication through your non-coding work experience.
Getting Some Experience
The hardest coding job to get is your first one. Someone has to take a chance on you because you don't have a track record of shipping real code in production. The second job is often 10x easier to get than the first one, at least in my experience.
However, there are some tricks for finagling some work experience, even if you haven't technically had a job in tech before...
Build for Free
I do not recommend picking up an unpaid internship that requires you to quit a job that's currently paying you - even if it's not coding related. However, maybe you can help a local non-profit or small business with some of their technical needs in your spare time.
- Build them a website
- Write them a script that automates part of their workflow
- Build a server that pulls data from their Google Sheets and emails it to them every morning
The point is, if you can build a real solution that someone actually uses, you should put that on your resume as work experience. It doesn't matter that you weren't paid. We don't list salaries on our resumes anyway.
I love this ~90-second clip from the Backend Banter podcast where Bill Kennedy talks about hacking your way into some experience.
Contribute to Open Source
While not required, this is one of the most under-utilized tools for providing signal to employers that you know what you're doing. If your pull requests have been merged into a popular open-source project that's used in production by real companies, that's a great indication that you know what you're doing. Depending on the size of the contribution it can be as good as or even better than "real" work experience.
The trick is to make sure your contribution is significant. Don't just fix a typo in the docs. Add a new feature or fix a bug (and add tests for the bug). Make it something you can proudly list on your resume, and that you're happy to talk about in an interview.
Assignment
Add a "work experience" section to your resume.