9 Ways to Jumpstart your Tech Job Search in 2024

1. If you don’t already know, research what certifications are required for your desired job titles. If you don’t already have the certifications for your dream job, set SMART goals for achieving or upgrading these certifications for your chosen field, and work on them daily. Some popular tech certifications can be obtained from COMPTIA, The SANS Institute, ISC2, Cisco, Microsoft, Axelos, ASE, MySQL, Salesforce, PMP, and Scrum. There are many others available for other fields such as healthcare, insurance, sales, etc.

2. Utilize free online tech training, like my faves for cybersecurity-related training, Professor Messer and Network Chuck (and lots of other free written and video tutorial sources outside of YouTube). They can help you prepare for certification exams, beef up current skills, or add new skills to your toolkit quickly.

3. If you aren’t on LinkedIn already, set up your profile. It’s social media for professionals and businesses. Add all your education and job history, and earned degrees, licences and certifications to your profile. It’s like an online resume where thousands of employers seek employees!

4. Connect on LinkedIn with any professionals you already know. They may know someone you don’t who may have a job, and you can more easily be a job candidate by networking. Don’t be afraid to ask for recommendations and introductions from your LinkedIn Connections!

5. Follow some prominent business and/or government profiles relevant to your field, like the US CISA, NIST for cybersecurity. Also follow well known professionals in your field.

6. Post relevant information, such as articles you find about news in your field, on your LinkedIn feed on a regular basis, daily, weekly, monthly, whatever works for you. Add relevant comments on other’s posts, make them worth reading. Don’t just type “Great info”, tell them why it’s relevant to you and the field. Social media algorithms run on interactions, so interact!

7. LinkedIn also has a skills section on your profile where you can add skills you have, with details of how you gained them. For example, you may have gained skills through tasks from a job, school, group, or individual projects you worked on. This links your skills with your experience.

8. Gamified training can give you some needed experience too. Here are a few examples: Try Hack Me, Hack the Box, Pico CTF, Hacker101, etc. “Gamified” means you earn points for task completion/skills learned, earn badges for levels completed, track your progress on a dashboard, and even compete with others on a leaderboard. Some of these have career paths embedded in their game task organization. Many of these also have training built in or in separate areas of their sites. Other help is available by searching the web for hints, walkthroughs and tutorials for the rooms or tasks within these sites. There are also Discord, Slack or other community chats where help can be had.

9. Take advantage of LinkedIn’s job search feature! You can search for job opportunities with many options such as geographic location of the job, choice of remote, on-site or hybrid work, job titles, companies, and many other ways to filter your search. Other place to search are on the website of the company you would like to work for, or other aggregation sites like Indeed, Glass Door, or recruiting sites like ZipRecruiter, etc. Many recruiters now use AI (Artificial Intelligence) to scan resumes, so be sure all your skills and qualifications on your resume match requirements of the jobs before you apply. ZipRecruiter uses an AI chatbot to gather information for your job search, so others probably do too.