Top 3 free tips for anyone looking for website jobs

If you’re a website designer or website developer at the beginning of your journey, you may be wondering how to go about seeking employment within the industry, and looking at ways you can forge your own path. Below are our top 3 tips for anyone looking for website jobs in 2021.

1. Build a portfolio

When you’re looking for website jobs, or any industry where there is some form of creative output, employers expect to be able to see evidence of what you can do.

If you haven’t got much of a portfolio at the moment, your first port of call should be to see if any family or friends require any help with their website. Ultimately, the goal of this is to build your portfolio, so the money element isn’t important to begin with, meaning you may want to consider doing unpaid work initially, in return for the opportunity to build your portfolio as an inexperienced website designer/developer.

Additional ways you can build your portfolio is by signing up for freelancer websites like Fiverr, Upwork and Freelancer.com. These are the kind of websites I used myself in the early days, and is a great way of not only building your portfolio, but also giving you real world experience of what it’s like to compete for projects, deal with real clients with real problems, and being the one responsible for solving them.

2. Expand your skill set

Many website professionals have gone through a very focussed learning process, whether that be through college, university or self-taught.

Whilst being focussed on specific niches and disciplines can be a very good thing, if you get too much tunnel vision on what you want to be good at, and don’t think about what additional skills employers may need from you, it could hamper you.

I came from a very design-orientated background, and when I started forging my own path in the late 2000s, I quickly realised that the skill set I had developed over the previous few years, wasn’t enough to really make my mark. I therefore had to learn more about front end web development, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP, to enable me to offer a more complete skill set that employers were looking for.

Step out of your comfort zone and try to offer a skill set which is more of a package to an employer, covering multiple facets of both design and development. The more boxes you tick, the more of a commodity you will become, and the higher salary you will ultimately command.

3. Stay up-to-date

The web industry isn’t suitable for people who stagnate, get too relaxed and rest on their laurels. The digital space is moving too fast for most to keep up to begin with, so if you’re not developing your knowledge and learning about new technologies and new techniques, you’re falling even further behind.

Dedicate at least 2-3 hours a week for personal development. Whether that’s learning a new skill, or developing an existing one further, you NEED to keep up-to-date if you want to succeed.

Summary

The website industry is largely about self-development and improvement in your chosen discipline, and if the need arises, pushing out of your comfort zone. A skill set needs to be in demand for it to be worth anything, so make sure you’re ticking as many boxes as possible so that you don’t just retain your value, but increase it wherever possible.

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