I’ve had a very tough time finding my first position as a junior dev and have been looking into getting a paid mentor to help me out. Someone who can give me a specific, clear idea of what skills I might need to have, refine, etc, as well as some looser guidance and direction after losing my confidence.
Do any of you have experience with services like this? Somewhere like Mentor Cruise or something similar?
Edit: to be clear, I’m looking for my first role as a web developer, ideally frontend with React (which is what I feel most confident in). I’ve been at this for over a year and a half - I do have a portfolio, Github, etc with projects in JS and some basic Python. I’m aware of how to look for a job, but actually getting anyone to look at me has been the hard part, as I’ve only had two interviews that went nowhere. The handful of people who’ve seen my portfolio seemed fine with it and the impression I have is that it is enough to demonstrate my skill level, but I’m still getting very little back.
It definitively feels like AI is in my way in many ways. There’s clearly a lot of recruiters using it to sort through applications (I’ve gotten more than a few rejections that start with “Sure! Here’s a polite but firm letter rejecting a job candidate.”), but also the expectation that AI can do what I’d be doing as a junior, so why bother hiring juniors?
I get the point about publishing everything and I’ve been doing that. Even my janky early Python is on my Github. It’s just frustrating that I’m not even getting the chance to discuss it with an interviewer.
I’ll look into some of those channels and such as well, thank you.