Work Experiecne

[Anonymous]

I’m currently doing a software developer course which will earn me a city and guilds qualification. For the course I need to complete a months worth of work experience but for the life of me don’t know how to approach any of the companies. My question is should I go the direct approach or should I try make contact with an employee of a company? Thanks in advance for any help and my apologies if this in the wrong section.

[Anonymous]

Hey,

Well first off, just to be a jerk for 2 minutes, you aren’t going to get a months worth of work experience off any of the big companies. They generally don’t take on software devs for experience and those they do will probably be from connections with 3rd level institutes.

But its not all bad! The good side is that a host of new, smaller, indie games companies have sprung up, many of them registered as actual software dev houses and these may be all too keen to have someone help them out for a month.

My advice for this would be to find all the Irish companies that have a MAX of 10 employees and try there first. Stay away from big publishers, what little response they may give will almost defintely be plain no.

Hope this helps!

[Anonymous]

Red is right, your best chance of getting work experience is with smaller companies.

I might be able to give you some work experience with Fantom, working on this.

I’ll need a breakdown of your current skills and your experience with those skills (projects you have worked on, games you have modded, websites you have built etc.). If you don’t have any practical experience with the skills you are learning then you probably won’t be able to get a dev work placement. Without practical experience you become a potential liability, rather than a potential asset.

You can post the breakdown here, or email it to me at mark.aherne at fantom.ie.

If you aren’t practising your development skills outside of your course then start doing so now, that’s the most important piece of advice I can give.

[Author]

Posts