Autumn is approaching and this is typically job season for graduates. Many graduate programmes will open for applications, inviting final year students or recent graduates to apply.
For those looking for their first job as a software engineer, here’s five skills that will give you a standout CV and help you to secure more interviews.
1. CI/CD pipelines
Use Github Actions and YAML syntax to create an end-to-end testing and deployment workflow for an application. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) skills are highly valued in the graduate job market.
By demonstrating you have these skills, you are showing employers that you will contribute to improving the efficiency of their processes through automated testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Other CI/CD technologies that employers are looking for include Jenkins and AWS CodePipeline.
2. Unit Testing
Integrate a unit testing framework to test individual components of an application. Unit testing allows bugs to be identified earlier in the development cycle and reduces the number of defects released to production.
Software engineering teams use unit testing as a standard practice, and having these skills on your CV will help you to get more interviews as a graduate software engineer.
The most popular unit testing frameworks used by professionals include JUnit (Java), NUnit (.Net), pytest (Python), or Jest (JavaScript).
3. AWS or Azure
It’s essential to have skills in major cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. At a minimum, ensure you know how to build a web application that is hosted on one of these platforms and include these skills on your CV.
Employers will leverage cloud technologies to build serverless distributed applications that are secure and highly scalable. Graduates with these skills will be favoured as they are showing an interest in learning these technologies.
You can start by using your Python, Java or .Net skills to build a Serverless API using AWS Lambda or Azure Functions.
4. OAuth 2.0
Understanding OAuth 2.0 as a graduate software engineer and providing samples of code that implement OAuth demonstrates you have the skills to be a valuable member of a software engineering team.
OAuth 2.0 is a security protocol used for authorisation and is commonly used to secure REST API’s. Proficiency in OAuth 2.0 shows that you understand security principles which is crucial to protecting user data.
To start, you can build a REST API that performs CRUD operations, and implement the OAuth 2.0 flow for user authentication and authorization.
5. GIT Merging and Branching
Collaboration within Agile software engineering teams is essential as engineers work on different components of the same application. As a software engineering graduate, it’s important to have a solid understanding of the fundamentals of Git, as well as branching, merging and creating pull requests.
Employers will look for these skills on your CV, as it demonstrates you have worked as part of a team and are familiar with version control and merging contributions.
You can improve your skills with Git by collaborating in open-source projects, or integrating Git with CI/CD pipelines to automate testing and deployment.
