Experience > Qualifications. How I get a new job offer every week…
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Recently a large digital agency from London reached out to me to connect and we arranged for a “casual call”. My instant guess of this being a job offer was confirmed halfway through the call. They had discovered me on LinkedIn, impressed by my previous experience building brands and tech for multiple startups. They had guessed I was young, but they definitely weren’t expecting 21 or even anywhere near the early 20s. Needless to say, I had a job offer open for my taking in London city if I wanted to.
Interesting opportunity — but not exciting enough for me to get over the moon about. This is just one of many validations I get on a weekly basis that my experience is worth more than any qualification I could have achieved.
When you graduate from your university course, there are thousands of students competing for the same position as you might be. Your exam grades could only go so far to set you apart from the crowd.
Your qualification might only be a checkbox — just a requirement. What determines if you are successful is who you are, your experience and what you can do. Don’t get me wrong; having qualifications (a degree, master, etc.) are important in a lot of cases and it’s a great for opening doors and in many companies, a requirement. But in a lot of cases, that’s all it is. I know very few people who were hired purely based on qualifications alone. Qualifications without any experience and skills doesn’t account for much. There are hundreds of students with the exact same qualifications as you.
Experiences, on the other hand are unique to everyone. They set you apart. I know what you’re thinking… how can you get experience without a job?
You can create your own experience!
You can be adventurous. You don’t need to make money to gain experience. Some of the most famous companies were side projects that someone did for fun or to experiment. They did not have revenue from the start. Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, YouTube and many others were all just someone’s side projects at one point. This is true for some non-tech companies too.
I’m sure everyone at some point has had an idea for an app, a game or something that you wish existed. Maybe not something completely new but just a replica of something already out there — just slightly different or with a missing feature.
That’s all you need to build something. Ideas are easy — implementation is hard — that’s what makes companies successful. It’s never just an idea and there are other factors that are more important to build a successful company. Startup life is hard with so many ups and downs, but when you are looking to just get some experience, an idea is all you need to get started. The experience will lead you to bigger and better ventures.
What better time to explore your dreams other than when you're a student?
You, as a student are at a great advantage, with greater opportunity. You can do things now that you can’t do further down the line.
One of the coolest jobs I have is working with my company SprintFire, helping founders build their products — designing and building apps. A few weeks back we were in Edinburgh when RBS (The Royal Bank of Scotland) had invited us to speak at an Intrapreneurship event they were hosting. After our demo and talk, one of the attendees came to tell us about his startup. His idea seemed really good, he knew his market, he had suppliers and demand. But… he had to quit his full-time job to make it possible. He was a family man and he was considering to get a loan by remortgaging his house to finance his startup, but he also has his entire family depending on him. It’s a huge risk — if his venture doesn’t work out, he would be losing more than just his company…
As students you don’t have that level of risk. There's probably not going to be another time in your lives where you can explore and afford to invest your time into something that does not pay off immediately.
At worst, if what you're doing doesn’t work out, you would have gained tons of experience, meet some amazing people and made some great connections which will always be useful to you down the line. You would have also attempted to build something! You can always talk about the successes and failures. If it does fail, your failure is only paving the path to your success.
Failure is part of success. I’ve had many of them and it was all necessary to learn some lessons I wouldn’t have learnt otherwise. We all learn from our mistakes.
How did I gain my experience?
I was never a smart or studious kid. Not being academically good in Indian schools can be very punishing. I moved with my family to Ireland when I was around 12 years of age. I wasn’t great academically here either. I was maybe just a below average student.
I was quite a shy and very pre-occupied person but I was always curious as to how things worked. I invested my time teaching myself programming since the age of 13 — I learned by doing. I coded & designed tons of things that I thought I would find useful. One of which is StudyNotes.ie — which I fully built when I was around 15 years of age in secondary school. It is currently one of the most popular secondary school revision websites in Ireland. In the following years I gained tons of experience doing things that I loved doing. In the last two years I’ve been involved in the startup scene, building multiple tech startups.
Half of the things I did in the past failed. We did not create a successful & sustainable business. Sure, we failed, but it was all a great learning experience. We got to meet some amazing people, build our networks and all those failures contributed to the big successes that we have had with other companies in the following months and years.
All those logos above don’t mean much to you who has never heard or seen any of them. But when I was working for these startups, I’ve had the opportunity to have worked with some incredible companies and their teams. Won tons of competitions, ran events, were in accelerators, raised funding, built teams and made money.
You might be thinking that maybe I’m just very qualified and that’s the reason why I’ve been able to gain so much experience. Nope. That’s very far from the reality. I don’t have much qualifications—in fact, all of my friends and probably you reading my blog post have or will have more formal qualifications that I do.
Experience is what has brought me this far. Not qualifications.
I’m only 21 and last year I dropped out of my university degree course. I’m a designer, programmer and an entrepreneur. You see, I don’t actually work. I love what I do: designing, coding, building products, running businesses and starting ventures. More than that, I love the people I work with, the people I get to meet, share my knowledge & skills to. I’m evaluated based on my previous experience, skills and personality. Not qualifications.
One last thought…
P.S. Doing what you enjoy > having a job. But that’s for another blog post ;)
Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life. — Confucius
