Now that you've completed your Labs project, it's time to leverage your experience to find a job in the tech industry.
Your Labs experience is a valuable portfolio piece! Be prepared to discuss:
Learn how to leverage career coaching resources to maximize your job search success.
Draft and send 5 cold emails, tracking your outreach in Job Tracker.
The goal of outreach is to make contact with your future employer.
In your outreach, you want to get as close as possible to your future team. Here's how to prioritize people at the company you're applying to, and what tools to use.
When you've sent 5 cold emails and tracked your outreach in Job Tracker, your progress will be reflected here. It may take some time for the assignment to update.
| Due | For | Available from | Until |
|---|---|---|---|
| - | Everyone | - | - |
Learn effective strategies for reaching out to potential employers and building your professional network.
Subject: Junior Developer Seeking Advice on [Specific Topic]
Body:
Hi [Name],
I recently completed BloomTech's web development program and worked on [brief project description]. I came across your profile and was impressed by [something specific about their work/company].
Would you be open to a 15-minute call to discuss [specific question or topic]? I'd greatly value your perspective.
Thanks for considering,
[Your Name]
Apply to 5 jobs and track them in Job Tracker
Job searching is tiring! Especially when you don't hear back from companies.
Some job seekers take a quantity approach to their search, submitting applications through "one-click" or "easy apply"- you upload your resume and call it a day. The act of clicking submit might feel productive in the moment, but days or weeks later this approach doesn't often produce the desired result - an invitation to an interview. You might as well call this approach the application or resume black hole.
If you want a higher response rate on applications you need to:
Now that you know how to submit quality applications, time to deep dive into app follow-up. When you submit an app your work isn't over!
You need to try to get your app seen by a human so it doesn't languish in the ATS.
➡️ Fast facts about follow-up:
To understand why we outreach, it's useful to understand exactly how an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) works. When you apply to a role, your app lands in a database of many other names. Because no one has time to review every single app submitted for a job (not even for the proverbial 7.4 seconds) the hiring team needs to use the ATS to cut the list to a manageable size.
Teams can filter on things like years of experience, location, or things that were listed as "nice to haves" in the description. It actually doesn't really matter what a hiring team filters on, because you simply can't customize your resume for every filter out there.
Instead of customizing your resume for every possible filter a hiring team might use, it's more efficient to use outreach to get yourself on the hiring team's radar. Don't wait for an ATS to surface you, your outreach increases the chance someone will pull up your app.
No matter where you are in the ATS, filtered out or not, they can search for your app. Outreach is an important tool to advocate for yourself in the hiring process. Get around the ATS, and do your best to ensure that the time you spent on your quality application doesn't go to waste.
You might be thinking — hold on. I spent time on my application, submitted it through the company site, applied within 24 hours of the role being posted, I'm a 50% match for what they are asking for.
Won't the team know my name by those steps alone?
...maybe. Sometimes you'll get invited to interviews without outreach, especially when you're among the first to apply. But in your job search, you want to operate on more than maybes! Outreach increases the potential for someone to see your quality application.
Apply to 5 jobs, tracking their status in Job Tracker. Use our criteria for quality:
On the next page, you'll move on to implement the most critical step: sending an outreach note to a talent or technical professional at each company.
When you've applied to 5 jobs and tracked them in Job Tracker, your progress will be reflected here. It may take some time for the assignment to update.
| Due | For | Available from | Until |
|---|---|---|---|
| - | Everyone | - | - |
Learn how to create effective job applications and increase your chances of landing interviews.
Sarah, a recent BloomTech graduate, applied these strategies and landed a job within 2 months:
In this module, we'll walk through the process you'll follow in Labs to get your resume, LinkedIn profile, and GitHub profile fully career-ready by incorporating your Labs project. You'll also ensure your Learner Profile is up to date!
Just like in Applied CS, you'll submit your Career Artifacts as part of this module. You'll prepare by reviewing the resources in this module and preparing your project information. Your Resume Reviewer will evaluate them and provide feedback as necessary.
If one or more of them still needs work, you'll get targeted feedback on how to improve them, and you'll be able to resubmit them once you've made the required revisions.
At that point, you'll also have the option to schedule a live, one-on-one review session. This session builds on the work you put in last unit—your Resume Reviewer will work with you to incorporate your Labs project and finalize your artifacts before graduation.
Regardless, though, if all your artifacts still aren't passing after two submissions, you'll be required to schedule a review session.
Since Labs is also officially the start of your job search, you'll find plenty of resources and
instructions in the Job Search course in Canvas—but for our purposes here, you'll need to
source, apply to, and conduct outreach to at least five jobs to pass this course!
Note: If you attended and passed Applied CS, your resume is hopefully already adapted to the template. If not, please ensure it is before submitting it!
We've done our fair share of homework here (trust us on this!), and we've refined everything we've learned about what works into a template that optimizes for getting across the critical information hiring managers are looking for, fast.
⚠️ You'll need to use the template for your track to pass Labs:
Read these first!
Now you're ready to update your technical bullet points to reflect the projects you've worked on.
If this is your first time writing technical bullet points, start by first writing down what you did for each project in as much detail as possible. Then move on to editing those into stronger bullet points.
⚠️ Remember to include your Labs project prominently! If you feel you haven't contributed significantly enough to your project, work with your team to get unblocked. You should be pushing commits daily!
Take a quick breather—then go through our Resume Checklist.
When you've finished, make sure to mark this page as Done below!
Prepare for technical interviews by practicing coding challenges and system design questions.