Transcript from the "Education" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> So let's talk education. Now, I do not have a CS degree. I have a criminal justice degree because I was in the military, security forces which focus on security and law enforcement. I minored in marketing after I got the criminal justice degree. I have absolutely zero experience on the technical side of doing anything.
[00:00:26] I learned everything through much like everyone else, the hard knocks of life, going through and learning stuff, boot camp stuff, learning stuff, old school style. I never used YouTube, but I was a big blogger. I love reading blogs, David Walsh, his blog is my favorite book to read.
[00:00:46] I wish I could just pour tea and just read that blog, get paid to read it out loud for Audible all the time, but they won't. There you go for those of you guys looking for it, David Walsh, amazing. He used to work at Mozilla. He's the GOAT, right, he is the greatest of all time.
[00:01:15] So definitely check out his blog if you're looking for things to read on JavaScript, and just being making yourself better. I highly recommend it. But that's where I learned a lot of my stuff when I first started that and MDN. So education right here, you have your first list, you put in the middle or you can put it at the end, doesn't matter.
[00:01:38] I always tell people, if you have college and you have a CS degree, put it immediately underneath your introductory statement. It's going to help with the biases that people have with you. It's gonna lower some of those gates that are gonna be kept. So yeah, if you have a technology degree, put that right underneath your education or underneath your introductory statement, right?
[00:02:03] So if you don't, put it at the end. But make sure that when you're putting your stuff there, you're putting things that are relevant. For instance, I don't put my degree on my stuff at all because I am, it's not relevant. So my education, I don't even put that on there because I have a bunch of other things now that I don't use.
[00:02:25] But if I was looking at past me, this is exactly how I would do it. I've put my education right here, so let me put general assembly, let's see, 2014, I think. No, that was 2013. Web developer, Immersive, and if I'm being honest, I think I learned Git in Bootstrap.
[00:03:00] That's only lessons that I remember from there, but let's see, if I was here, Because it's less than 20 you got to use this part, right? 12 week Immersive gotta write it out, where we focused on, Front end development, Rails work. Nope, not Rails work. Sorry, Ruby on Rails, Git, and what else would I say?
[00:03:48] Bootstrap since I remember using the mouse and, Node, all right, so this is what I would put right here. Now what I would do differently right now is I'll put right here, boom. Cuz Git would come before say, same thing with Bootstrap. I like to put things in order, so it makes sense when it has a nice flow, Because bootstrap is a part of frontend development, so it's right there.
[00:04:35] Ruby on Rails and Node, so I try to make things flow well. Make sure there's no typos, I just double apostrophe right here, or double comma. But in your current era, you have to make sure your things that you also learned, soft skills. Working asynchronously. Working asynchronously and remotely.
[00:05:13] With teams and having deadlines, managing tickets, managing tickets. And leading a team because I ended up leading, being the person who got yelled at all the time for for a project. Yeah, so that's how I would put my, from four score and seven years ago, ancient, [LAUGH] stuff on here based upon that.
[00:05:48] If you are now modern, I would make sure, especially if you were doing Teams, I would make sure learn about how a GitFlow workflow method. Either research on your own, ask your bootcamp instructor how to do that. Or just just pull some guys off of Slack, and be like, yo, can we practice this?
[00:06:11] So you'd be amazed how many people, hey, yo, can we practice this together? Yeah, sure, why not? How to make a great user story and tickets. Those are most of those important skills. I don't know what they teach in boot camps yet, but I know we teach it.
[00:06:27] So definitely look that up as well, how to make a user story. And be able to plan out a good ticket because every company has a planning meeting now, so definitely do that. There's not a lot of other things I can think of. I'm pretty sure more will come to me though as we keep this going.
[00:06:47] So yeah, so who has questions, let's go.
>> In the chat somebody was asking that they have an unrelated bachelor's degree, should they list that and what would they write?
>> In education, cool, right here, I would just do it just like this. I'll put underneath my relevant stuff.
[00:07:06] And I would just put how I would do for myself, Florida State University, what was it, it four score and seven years now? 2004, 2009, all right. And bachelor of science, yeah, bachelor's of science, criminal justice, there we go. That's it, right? It doesn't matter because it's not going to really help the education part.
[00:07:46] It's where your experience is gonna come forward in that stage, right? So if you list it, it's fine. I personally don't list it because out of all the experience I had, I don't put any of this, the education part on my resume any more. Because I have enough experience where I went to school at, no one cares, right?
[00:08:08] It's not even like once, your bootcamp is only relevant to your experience your first year of trying to get a job. And then after that, once you have a job for a year, all that's relevant is your experience on the job, right? Cuz that's how because tech moves so fast, especially front end, we're the most volatile industry on the market.
[00:08:32] We move faster than the speed of light, right? Every time you turn around, there's a new framework, there's a new CSS thing, TC39's adding something. You go to sleep at night and you wake up in the morning, the whole world is on fire, right? So you have to think of it like that, we are an ever-evolving craft.
[00:08:54] So you have to be ever-evolving with it.
>> How do I approach showing I was self taught through online courses and certifications?
>> If it is a premium course that comes with a certification, I know Wes Bos, he has courses that all come with certs. I would actually put those on there to show that you have the cert.
[00:09:14] Some of the things I went with, I'd focus on premium stuff than not, like the FCC certs, I don't see how much value they would have considering other access. But yeah, Wes Bos's stuff I can see that as a, I think that's the only person I know who does that.
[00:09:33] Or maybe Pluralsight I don't know if I can say that on here. Can I say it on here?
>> You can.
>> Okay, cool. [LAUGH] They have a crazy hard test that you can go through that, if you pass you get competent on any of those, it's like you know what, you deserve it.
[00:09:52] You can have that, there's also let me, this right here, Test, there was a fun test that we took, and I can't find it now. Is this it, is this the one, the nightmare? That's okay, come on, what are you doing? I guess, darn it, his cert is gone, boo.
[00:10:26] Get your certs up people, but yeah, so I'm gonna find it. There is a front end developer test that my troops and I took, it has like a 55% success rate and it's free, but it is so hard. And if you can pass that, I would screenshot it and put it everywhere, it was, man, it was tough and I think we had a few mentors pass it.
[00:10:51] Some of our alumni, but none of the phase one troops passed it like, it was wow, it was painful. I was like man, this is hilarious, but everybody was phase two, passed it. I'm gonna find it. And I'll definitely be sharing that in my docs with you guys and tweeting it out.
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>> Yeah, what about courses that don't have completion certificates?
>> The main purpose of courses when it comes to an employer is it showcases that you can complete something, right? So if you go to Udemy and you don't have a bunch of courses that you're doing or maybe the path, right, Frontend Masters, that's a great one, right, where you complete the path.
[00:11:36] If you have a path completion or you can screenshot that, I would do it. But Udemy, you can't really do that because it's Udemy. So that's like how would I recommend it. If you complete all the paths that Frontend has, Frontend Masters has, that's a great thing that you can talk about, right?
[00:11:58] Because it showcases a path of completion, but other organizations, if it doesn't have that, I wouldn't talk about it unless it has a path of completion to it, right? All the metrics are met like, FEM they have that, they have the free front end developer handbook that I absolutely love them.
[00:12:19] I was waiting for 2020 to drop but I guess outside closed and they forgot about us who loves the book, #tears. I think they have a couple JavaScript books, but their path system is what I really love, and I'd really recommend that everybody go through the paths. Make sure that you if you're on your resume, make sure you're saying that you've completed those paths.
[00:12:41] So that way they know that hey, I have these core competencies skills.
>> Should you tailor your resume to a specific job posting?
>> I don't, that's one of the things that people do that I do not do. And it works amazing for me or it's amazing for my troops.
[00:13:00] I am what I call an offensive resume writer, I do not write resumes to tailor to the job. I write my resume to showcase all of my strengths. And then I look for jobs that match my strengths, right? You have to be counter, because guess what, all the time that you're spending editing your resume doing this little bit here, that little bit there.
[00:13:24] You could be building something that would catch somebody's eye, that would make them hire you on the spot, right? Or hire you for a tool that they you've never used. My first one, I like React, right? I was so busy doing things in React and Gatsby and focused on having one resume, that I was hired initially for CBS to do an app that was using Ember.
[00:13:47] Never used Ember, absolutely loathe Ember, it's not my thing, not my jam. But guess what, because of the things I was doing, they didn't care because they knew that I was working hard enough to learn this type of stuff. Same thing with Angular, things of that nature. I might say I love React, I don't write a lot of Angular.
[00:14:08] But because of what I do and how I've been like, because I've been focusing on building things. They're like you know what, we know that you can do this stuff. So they are banking on that potential because you have that desire, or you you showcased that diligence, right?
[00:14:23] So I personally, I write my resume really well once that showcases all my strengths. And then I focus on finding the job that matches my strengths versus trying to rewrite it to hopefully get past HR. I think that's a thing that a lot of entry level developers don't get.
[00:14:45] You're gonna be part of a team, you're gonna be part of a unit, what they're looking for from your resume, is they're looking for core competency. They're looking for self starting, they're looking for teamwork and collaboration. And most importantly, they're looking for potential. Every company is looking for potential whether they're looking to fill that other 20% of the gap of your education or that 50% of the gap of your education.
[00:15:11] In the end, they're looking for potential. So if you showcase the potential and along with the core competencies, you're gonna do all right. Do you have anything else, Yusef? I know I kind of cut you off on that.
>> If an online course comes with a certification or nano degree, should I post that on my resume?
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>> All right, well, if it comes with a cert, then, yeah, sure. If it has a cert, you can talk about it, I don't know how much weight those hold. I think what you build holds a lot more weight than what you are certified in. I have zero certs in technology, I have never had a cert.
[00:15:53] So the whole I think that comes from the whole AWS and .NET world or the older Microsoft stuff, where they used to have certifications and things like that. They look more for you being able to talk about it competently and build things with it and showcasing what you can do more so than a certification.
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>> I heard Udacity has portfolio projects.
>> Yeah, yeah, and we're gonna get into that because when it comes to portfolios, I have a different way of doing that as well that really works. And we're going to talk more about that as well.
>> I'm having a bit of a challenge rectifying the fact that you're telling people to do courses with certificates, but you said you don't have certificates yourself.
[00:16:40] So I'm trying to figure that out. [LAUGH]
>> I'm saying, do courses to have certs, if you're going to be putting them on your resume. You don't need the certs on your resume but if they're asking, I'm not saying do courses that have certs. I'm saying, if you're going to put them on your resume only focus on the ones that have like a path or course completion, like the Frontend Master paths, or a certification of some sort, right?
[00:17:09] So if it's a premium course yes, if you complete it and you had to pay, a bunch of stuff, money for it, yes, put that on your resume. But for the most part, looking for experience or looking at your education it really only comes down to boot camps or college.
[00:17:28] Even here if you're self taught, just omit the whole section.