Time to get serious

After the initial rush and learning all you can - for free - comes an inevitable low on the progressbar. It is hard, one might even call it a turning point on your road to success.

You will have to decide, how you want to proceed from here. Hard? Very! It depends a lot on where you live and what is the “common practice” in your country of residence, but you will probably have to choose between the following choices:

  1. Try to score an Internship (Ausbildung in German) at an IT Company. Might be tricky, since there are a few companies, that dare to take people with no working experience and pay them money for learning, but if you are lucky enough then this is the right way to go. Nothing replaces a real working experience in my book.

  2. If you don’t have the possibility to learn and work at the same time, then just keep on learning! After the free-for-all offers do not help you forward anymore, then just move on. Trust me, it’s worth it! A great way to go on, is by sign up for a course, which you actually have to pay for. I’m sorry BUT:

    • It shows You are serious and want to invest in Your future.
    • You might get a certificate and actually score a job.




But which course to choose? What is the best one out there: not overpriced and yet still has some value?

Good question!

There are a lot of offers out there. Something for everybody - so to say. So here are a few, that I’ve looked into:

  1. CodeSchool is relative cheap and nice place to learn. Focus on all kinds of thing, but I don’t think it will help you “land a job.”

  2. Udemy has a lot of different courses, a great place to learn f.e about Google products and a lot more. Bonus:
    It will also give you a certificate at the end of every paid course. Additionally you can display it under your linkedIN profile page. Nice trick by Udemy, not sure how helpful it actually is tho.

  3. If you don’t have the time or the money to get a CS degree at a University, then I recommend signing up for Harvard’s CS50 course. Truly the best money can buy. You can also see it for free, but paying for it will grant you a certificate signed by the authors, that is valued by a lot of companies - so you should really consider sign up for it.
    More info and questions about HarvardCS50 at reddit’s CS50.

Good luck at whatever you decide to do!

Written on March 11, 2015