Once you have your past work experiences documented, and you have built a habit of doing this for your current day-to-day work, then you can be on the lookout for opportunities in your current work environment. Or if you aren’t already working in tech, whatever you are currently doing. Whether that be working a non-tech job, building a personal project, volunteering, taking a course, or anything else. You can use this method for anything that you do.
- find a project at your current job that you can own and kick ass on.
- everything you do for this project should tie back to the skills you are trying to gain for interviewing
- keep an eye out for hidden opportunities
- things that you have to do that are tedious, frustrating, boring, fragile, error-prone, etc.
- For example, when I got my job at battleface (the job before I got hired at Amazon), from day 1 my goal was to make an impact there. They had no production release schedule, I made a simple document that we used to track our production releases. Took no more than an hour, but had a big impact. Those little wins are great things to track for yourself.
- document as much of what you do as you can
- it's easy to forget what you do throughout the day, the more you look the more you'll find small little wins that you can use as examples in your interviews.
- Follow the same pattern from above in documenting your past experiences