Career Support: Shape Your Job Search

Conducting an effective job search is tough – especially if you're doing it on your own. At Flatiron School, we ensure students get the support they need from all angles in order to be successful. Here are some of the ways our team helps students throughout the process. We'll share why they're so essential for students' career journeys and what tips you can apply to yours.

Job Search Preparation

It's important to not go into a job search blind. Put in the time to do your research and read up on best practices. There's a multitude of resources available online. At Flatiron School, before students complete our technical curriculum, they have access to a full Career Prep curriculum, too, that explains how to run a job search, including everything from networking to following up after an interview. We know what it takes to be successful, and over the past four years, we've built curriculum and experiences to guide our students and graduates through that process.

Career Counseling

The job search can be hard if done in isolation. Especially if you're new to the tech world, having a mentor to demystify the processes, help with goal-setting, and hold you accountable can be invaluable. Getting an extra set of eyes on your résumé and other materials to catch things you might miss, whether it's from an expert or friend, can never hurt. At Flatiron School, in particular, our Career Counselors are trained to help students get in the head of the hiring manager reviewing their candidacy and tell their story in a way that's compelling – even if their past experience isn't at all in engineering. Before graduation, Flatiron students get access to career counselors to help them prepare for the job search – including a full review of their resumé and LinkedIn profile, practice technical and non-technical interview sessions, and one-on-one conversations with a career counselor to discuss goals. Graduates of programs with job-search support can expect regular check-ins from their designated career counselors.

Career counseling takes a lot of different forms, depending on who the graduate is, and what they need. It can mean coaching graduates to tap their networks for opportunities, consulting on how best to follow-up after an interview, giving advice on how to start conversations at a meetup, offering tips on how to negotiate an offer, or really providing additional guidance wherever our graduates need it. Career Counselors help bring our Career Prep curriculum to life, working the best practices students learn through reading and exercises into each individual graduates' real-life job search. In addition to the formalized stuff – help translating the curriculum into actual interactions with employers, structured meetings with their coaches, and guidance on what to do in specific job-search scenarios – sometimes graduates just need a sympathetic ear, and coaches will offer that, too. Job searching, like learning to code, can be taxing and emotionally draining. Whatever the job-search issue, your career counselor's job is to help. Pro tip: If you're overwhelmed, be sure to give yourself time to process that feeling – the best way forward is to talk through it, whether it's with a mentor, friend, or career coach.

Employer Connections

Flatiron School also has a staff of individuals working directly with employers, just to figure out how best to evangelize for our graduates inside companies. While we can never be certain which companies will want to connect with which specific graduates, we've had the opportunity to make hundreds of connections over the years that have ended in jobs. Those connections can take the form of an invitation to a special recruiting event at a company's offices, an opportunity to meet employers during one of our on-campus recruiting events, or a direct introduction for an interview after graduation.

But having an employer connection is only one piece of the puzzle – students have to be ready to put in the work to leverage our extensive employer network. Lucky, they have been more than up for that challenge, using advice and preparation from their career coaches to make inroads in our network and significantly expand their own.

Are you ready to start your new career as a software engineer? Learn more about how to be a no-brainer tech hire by downloading our free eBook and tuning into our free AMA with our Career Coaches.

This piece was sponsored by Flatiron School.

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