The Five Months Between Graduating and Getting Hired

I graduated from Laguna University in July 2024 with a BS in Information Technology, a capstone project I'd built alone, and no job.

That last part is the bit nobody puts on a portfolio. A degree tells an employer you finished something. It doesn't tell them you can ship.

On 29 July 2024 — twenty-seven days after graduating — I started Codebility's Frontend Developer Training Program. I finished on 2 December. By January I was employed as an Associate System Developer at VizServe.

This post is about that gap, because I think it's the part of a junior developer's timeline that gets skipped.

What the programme actually covered

Modern web frameworks, with Next.js as the main one. Version control with Git. Building interfaces that are responsive and accessible rather than merely working on the machine they were written on.

That last one turned out to matter more than I expected. Accessibility had been a chapter in a textbook. On the programme it was a requirement of the work.

Two projects

The programme's output was two builds:

• A responsive Deadpool and Wolverine site — a marketing-style page, which is where the responsive work had nowhere to hide.
• An e-commerce storefront — product listing, cart, checkout flow.

What it was really for

Looking back, the technical content wasn't the valuable part. I could have worked through Next.js documentation on my own, and had.

What I couldn't manufacture alone was the pressure of building to someone else's standard on someone else's schedule, and having the result looked at. University gave me that once, for the capstone. The programme gave it to me weekly.

The part that transferred

Six months later I was replacing a school's admissions portal — 1,539 applications across three academic years — and the Next.js I learned on the programme was the stack I did it in.

The path from responsive marketing page to production enrolment system is shorter than it looks. Both are forms, validation, state, and someone on the other end who will abandon the thing if it's slow or confusing.

If you're in the same gap

What I'd say from the outside: the gap between graduating and being hired isn't dead time unless you let it be. Mine was five months, and it's the reason the sixth month had a job in it.