On any challenge you pose yourself, if you don’t have some easy wins you can tick off to get that little kick of dopamine and have you feeling more able to take on those bigger tasks.

When I talk about easy wins, I’m referring to tasks that are high impact, low effort/time required.

Here’s some easy wins you can either get out of the way to get on a roll, or disperse them between more involved tasks to keep having little wins.

1. Fix your resume.

There’s a mountain of content online for free on optimising resumes. So I don’t have to list it over and over again, when a recruiter’s reading through your resume, they usually have <10 seconds to get interested or not. Everything you do is to make it easier for the recruiter to quickly digest the information they get when they skim over it, or draw their eye to something you want them to pay a bit more attention to.

• Get yourself a good template. Muted colours or black & white only. I prefer experience first & education last, but that’s your call.
• Use professional language. No slang, no swearing, nothing misspelt. You can use spellcheck aswell as grammarly to help you with that if you have noone else to proofread it.
• If you get the opportunity when applying, supply a cover letter. Do your research first and personalise it to the job application. This will give you an opportunity to get across your personality.
• Go through your previous experience, make sure you’re listing anything pertinent that will be useful in an IT role. Troubleshooting, Management, Customer Service are all easily cross industry applicable. If you can’t think of anything, ask friends and family.
• Look into keywords that will help you get picked up by the automated searches and integrate it into your resume in an organic manner (not just listing the words)

2. LinkedIn

If you’re reading this on LinkedIn, great. If you know someone hunting for a job that isn’t on LinkedIn, send them this article. If you’re not on LinkedIn using it for industry relevant networking, you’re doing yourself a dis-service. Yes it can seem like a circlejerk, but it’s a necessary evil.

Once you are on LinkedIn, there’s things you can do to increase your chances of getting noticed.

• Optimise the profile with relevant keywords.
• Show off any projects you’re working on to show your enthusiasm
• Be active! Even just liking posts will show you’re using the service, and others will get notifications. Creating content yourself is even better as it shows your enthusiasm.
• Do the skill quizzes you can for the free skill badges. It’ll make you show up in more searches, and make your profile look better. Some of them are no joke.
• Any certifications/qualifications you receive, put them on there. It’s basically a 2nd resume

3. GitHub

If you don’t know what GitHub is and you’re in IT, you need to educate yourself. Here’s a free course on it:freeCodeCamp Git & GitHub Crash Course

If you do know about GitHub, use it! Anything you code, document, projects you build, host them on GitHub. This will be your portfolio that you can put links to on LinkedIn, on your resume etc.

It shows you’ve put rubber to the road and used the knowledge you’ve gained studying in a practical manner instead of just reading a book and saying you know it.

If you’ve got any other easy wins someone can do to help get #IThired let me know on LinkedIn (Link at the bottom of the page)