How to get real project experience before your first tech job
Entry-level roles ask for experience you can’t get without a job. Here is what counts as real project experience, five ways to build it, and how to show it.
Guide
How to choose a tech track: full-stack, AI, mobile, DevOps, frontend or data
Choose a tech track by the kind of problem you enjoy, then test it with a one-week experiment. What each of six tracks is really like, and what carries over if you switch.
The short answer
Pick the track whose everyday problems you enjoy, then test that choice with a small project for a week before committing. You learn fastest on work you care about, and the fundamentals carry over if you change your mind later.
Three questions to ask yourself
- What would you like to see at the end of a good day? A screen that looks right, a system that stayed up, a number you can trust, a feature working end to end?
- What kind of frustration can you live with? Every track has one: layout bugs, flaky pipelines, messy data, models that won’t improve.
- Which job descriptions make you curious? Read a few for each track. Notice which ones you finish reading.
The six tracks, honestly
Full-Stack Web
What the work feels like: Moving between the interface, the API and the database, and making them agree.
You’ll probably enjoy it if you like understanding how the whole thing works, end to end.
A one-week experiment: Build a tiny app with a login, one database table and one page that lists and edits rows. Deploy it.
AI & Machine Learning
What the work feels like: Cleaning data, choosing a baseline, and measuring honestly whether a model helps.
You’ll probably enjoy it if you are curious about data and patient with experiments that don’t work the first time.
A one-week experiment: Take a public dataset, predict one thing with the simplest model you can, and compare it with guessing.
Mobile Development
What the work feels like: Building for small screens, touch and unreliable networks, then testing on real devices.
You’ll probably enjoy it if you want to make something people carry around and use every day.
A one-week experiment: Build a two-screen app that saves a note on the phone and still works in airplane mode.
DevOps & Infrastructure
What the work feels like: Automating builds, tests and deployments so a team can ship safely and often.
You’ll probably enjoy it if you like systems, the command line, and making repetitive things happen by themselves.
A one-week experiment: Put a small app in a container and add a pipeline that runs its tests on every push.
Frontend Engineering
What the work feels like: Turning designs into accessible, fast, reusable components.
You’ll probably enjoy it if you notice when an interface feels wrong, and you want to fix it properly.
A one-week experiment: Rebuild one page of a site you like so it works with a keyboard and a screen reader.
Data Engineering
What the work feels like: Moving data between systems, modelling it, and making sure it can be trusted.
You’ll probably enjoy it if you like SQL, tidy tables and knowing that a number is right.
A one-week experiment: Load a messy public spreadsheet into a database, clean it, and answer one question with a query.
Three myths
- “Pick whatever pays most.” Pay varies more with skill, location and employer than with the name of a track — and you will get better faster at something you enjoy.
- “Only AI matters now.” AI work depends on data pipelines and software engineering underneath it. Those skills are valuable on their own and in AI teams.
- “The choice is permanent.” Plenty of engineers move between areas during a career. Your first track is a starting point.
What carries over if you switch
Whichever track you start with, these skills move with you:
- Git, pull requests and code review
- Reading documentation and error messages carefully
- Debugging: forming a guess, testing it, and narrowing down
- HTTP, JSON and how services talk to each other
- Basic SQL
- Writing clearly about what you built and why
On Branchout, every track shares the same first stages, and switching costs nothing. Compare the six tracks.
More guides
Is an unpaid internship legal? What students should check
Whether an unpaid internship is legal depends on where you are and who benefits from the work. The tests in the U.S., British Columbia, Ontario and the UK, and what to ask before you say yes.
Plant your roots
Create a free account, choose your track and start at your own pace. No card needed, and you can pause or leave at any time.