Hire Yourself: Learning Through Personal Projects

In 2013, Jennifer Dewalt was new to coding. Brand new. She needed to learn everything, and back then, there were just a fraction of the resources available to learn. Jennifer decided to challenge herself—she set out to make 180 websites in 180 days. They’re extremely minimalist and basic by today’s standards—but they still work, and she learned the skills she needed to grow in her field. Was it worth her time? She went on to start zube.io, so…yes. (She also started the project on a borrowed laptop, because her own computer had broken.) 

Why Personal Projects?

When you’re a beginner in any field, it can be difficult to get your foot in the door. Often hiring managers look for several years of experience even for entry-level positions. But how can you get that experience without someone taking a chance on hiring you?

You can hire yourself.

In creating personal projects, you can choose which skills to learn and grow. You can decide how you want to show off those skills. You can gain needed experience by simply deciding to start.

Develop Initiative:
Creating projects for yourself shows that you have initiative—potential employers will see that you are highly motivated, self-directed, and ambitious.

Problem Solving:
Creating projects is a perfect way to solve problems. Tina Roth Eisenberg couldn’t find a minimalist to-do app that matched her aesthetic, so she co-developed TeuxDeux. That was back in 2009. What started as a personal project became a product for sale, and continues to evolve to fit user needs.

And Jia Jiang set out to desensitize herself to the pain of rejection by seeking rejection in different forms, every day, for 100 days. That’s being proactive!

Spark Creativity:
Looking for your entry point to the workforce can be both exhausting and boring, to be honest—looking at job postings, crafting cover letters and CVs, and answering the same questions in job interviews—over and over again. Creating personal projects can make that time of waiting for a job offer productive and valuable.

Expand Your Network:
Developing personal projects can introduce you to people you never would have met otherwise. New projects, new skills, new ideas, and new contacts. It might be through asking questions on GitHub, comments on projects shared on social media, or people you meet in co-working spaces. 

No Pressure Learning:
When a programmer called Milecia was first learning to code, she quickly learned that by creating projects for herself, she was able to experiment without judgment. No one saw her code-in-process unless she wanted them to. She could experiment without having to justify her decisions to anyone else. Working for a client rarely gives that kind of freedom.

How to start (and finish) personal projects?

Decide on a project:
-Is there a specific skill you want to learn? If not, is there a skill you would love to work with, but haven’t yet had the opportunity to learn?
-Is there a cause you want to help? If you care about animals, you could reach out to a local animal shelter and ask if they need a website. If you care about the environment you could offer to design branding or t-shirts for a local environmental group.
-Do you know a website that is desperate for updating or tidying up? You might (kindly) offer to redesign their website.
-Sourish Kundu found that most people get hung up on deciding what kind of project to do, so they came up with a page of prompts for people wanting to create a tech project.  Don’t get paralyzed by indecision!

Create:
When Corey Dodd began creating personal projects, she decided to treat herself like a client. She went through all the same processes she would for a client, including creating mockups and establishing deadlines. She created an environment for herself where she learned technical skills as well as processes she would be expected to follow in a job setting.

Document:
Successful tech projects always benefit from documentation. Honestly, all projects would benefit from making time for documentation.

Hao Dong, a software engineer, makes sure he documents projects well. But he doesn’t just create documentation for potential colleagues or potential future users, he takes the process a step further and makes notes for himself of potential improvements based on what he learned during his projects. He makes the most of every chance to learn and grow.

Show Your Work:
As you make work, release it to the world. Not when you make perfect work. Not when you make work you consider great or worthy.  As you complete projects—share it. If you’re feeling extra generous, share the lessons you learned during the project too.

Showing your work will obviously introduce your skills to more people. It will also show your range of abilities, initiative, and creativity.
-Writing code? Perhaps you share it on GitHub.
-Designing websites? Make one of your own. Use it as a portfolio to show off the work you’re most proud of.
-Make the most of the visual components of your projects, whether beautiful corporate logos or elegant code, by sharing on social media. Reels or videos of designs in process, done well, can be as compelling as finished projects. Don’t wait for finished “perfection” before you share.

Revise:
As your skills grow, you will look back at earlier projects and know that you can do better. Some projects are best left in the past, as a stepping stone to where you are now. But some projects, maybe what was particularly fun, or frustrating, or what is now more popular, might be worth revisiting.
-If you took on the project now, how would you approach it differently?
-What have you learned that you can apply to the project?
-How has your style changed since you first made the project?
-Are you more efficient now? In what ways?
-Is this project something you’d like to try again?

Repeat:
You can create personal projects–hire yourself–for the rest of your life. As long as you are curious, you can create frameworks to explore your curiosity.

As you finish projects, and share them with the world, take a break if you need to. Then return to your list of potential projects and start another. Personal projects are great to do throughout your working life, but early in your career, before you land your first full-time job, is a unique time in your life. You will probably never have the same amount of time to devote to creating your own projects later in life. Take advantage of this time.

Header photo by Christiaan Colen.