How to Get Experience When Every Job Requires Experience

It’s the oldest job-search trap: you need experience to get a job, and a job to get experience. The way out is to stop waiting for someone to give you experience and start creating it. Almost everything a first job teaches, delivering real work, taking feedback, meeting deadlines, working with others, you can get outside a job. This guide covers ten practical routes, how to choose between them, and how to put the results on your resume so recruiters count them.

The short answer: Create experience that doesn’t need permission, then present it like a job. The ten best routes:

1. Build real projects that solve a problem for real users.
2. Freelance small paid jobs for local businesses, nonprofits and startups.
3. Contribute to open source projects you already use.
4. Volunteer your skills for a nonprofit or community group.
5. Take internships, apprenticeships and returnships, including short or part-time ones.
6. Do contract, temp or gig work in your target field.
7. Join hackathons and competitions.
8. Create experience in your current job by taking on projects in the area you want to move into.
9. Join student or community organisations and lead something.
10. Publish your work and learning in public.

Then list each one with a title, dates, what you did and a result, and apply even when a listing asks for a year or two more than you have.

First: “experience required” is often softer than it looks

Many listings ask for one to three years of experience because the hiring manager wrote down their ideal candidate. What they actually need is someone who can do the work. That’s why candidates with strong projects, internships or freelance work regularly get hired into roles that “require” experience.

Rules of thumb:

• Entry-level, junior, or “0–2 years”: apply if you meet most of the core skills.
• “2–3 years”: apply if you have substantial project, internship or freelance experience in the exact skills.
• “5+ years”, senior or lead titles: skip for now.

What makes the difference is evidence. Everything below is about creating it.

The 10 ways to get experience

1. Build real projects

Not tutorials: projects that solve a real problem, ideally with a few real users. A tool your club actually uses, a dashboard for a local business’s sales data, an app your friends rely on. Deploy them, write a README, and track something measurable (users, time saved, accuracy).

Why it works: it’s fully under your control and shows the whole cycle from problem to shipped result. Start here: weekend projects to build with Claude to get hired gives one project per role, and how to deploy a website on GitHub Pages gets it online for free.

2. Freelance

Small paid work: a website for a café, a spreadsheet model for a small firm, social media for a local gym, data cleanup for a researcher. Find clients through your network, local businesses, alumni groups, and freelance marketplaces.

Why it works: a paying client, a deadline, feedback and a reference. It reads as real work because it is. Tip: charge something, even a small amount. It makes the relationship professional.

3. Contribute to open source

Fix bugs, improve documentation, add tests in projects you use. Your merged pull requests are public, reviewed by experienced engineers and linked to your name.

Why it works: real codebases, real code review, public proof. Start here: what is open source contribution walks through your first pull request.

4. Volunteer your skills

Nonprofits, charities, community groups and student organisations need websites, data analysis, marketing, events and operations help, and rarely have budget. Offer a defined project with a finish date.

Why it works: real stakeholders and impact, and often more responsibility than an entry-level job would give you.

5. Internships, apprenticeships and returnships

Apply broadly, including to smaller companies and startups, which often give interns more ownership. Look for part-time, remote, and short (6–12 week) internships, and apprenticeship programmes in tech, data and digital marketing. Returnships are designed for people coming back after a career break.

Why it works: it’s formal experience with a company name, a manager and often a path to a full-time offer.

6. Contract, temp and gig work

Short contracts, temp roles and gig platforms in your field (user testing, data labelling and annotation, content writing, QA testing, virtual assistance for a startup) build relevant experience and references quickly.

Why it works: lower hiring bar, real employers, and it counts as work.

7. Hackathons and competitions

Weekend hackathons, case competitions, data challenges (such as those on Kaggle), design sprints and coding contests.

Why it works: teamwork under a deadline, a finished result, sometimes prizes, and recruiters often attend. Programmes like Google Summer of Code pay you to contribute to open source with a mentor.

8. Create experience in your current job

Already working, just not in your target field? Volunteer for projects that use the skills you want: automate a report, analyse customer data, help roll out a new tool, write documentation, run a small experiment.

Why it works: it’s paid, real, on your current employer’s name, and often the easiest way to switch careers. See how to switch careers into tech.

9. Student and community organisations

Lead something: run the technical side of a club, organise an event, manage a budget, start a study group, edit a publication.

Why it works: leadership, project management and teamwork examples for your resume and your behavioral interview stories.

10. Learn and build in public

Write short posts about what you’re building and learning on LinkedIn, a blog, or GitHub. Share project write-ups and lessons from mistakes.

Why it works: it makes your experience visible, attracts opportunities, and shows communication skills. How to optimize your LinkedIn profile covers how to present it.

Which route should you pick?

Route	Time to first result	Credibility with recruiters	Best for
Projects	Days to weeks	High if live and real	Everyone, especially tech roles
Freelancing	Weeks	High	Developers, designers, marketers, writers
Open source	Weeks	High for engineering	Developers, technical writers
Volunteering	Weeks	Medium to high	Any role
Internships	Months (application cycles)	Highest	Students, recent grads
Contract/gig	Days to weeks	Medium to high	Quick relevant experience
Hackathons	A weekend	Medium	Students, developers, designers
Current job projects	Weeks	High	Career changers

Combine two or three: for example, one strong project, one freelance or volunteer engagement, and ongoing applications for internships.

How to put it on your resume

Present every one of these the way you’d present a job:

Freelance Web Developer · Self-employed · Jan 2026 – Present

• Built and launched websites for 3 local businesses using Astro and Vercel; one client’s online bookings rose 40% in two months.
• Gathered requirements, delivered in 2-week cycles, and handled all client feedback directly.

Open Source Contributor · [Project name] · Mar 2026 – Present

• Fixed 4 bugs in the CLI’s config parser; all merged after code review (PRs #1203, #1250).

Tips:

• Use accurate titles: Volunteer Data Analyst, Freelance Designer, Open Source Contributor.
• Lead with results: numbers where you have them, outcomes where you don’t.
• Put the most relevant items first, in a section called Experience or Projects.
• Never inflate. Interviewers will ask about every line.

How to write a resume with no experience goes deeper on structure and examples.

Then apply, and tailor every time

Once you have evidence, the next problem is making each recruiter see it in the few seconds they spend on your resume. Different listings care about different parts of what you’ve done: a front-end role wants the website projects first; a data role wants the analysis. Tailr is a Chrome extension that tailors your resume to the job listing you’re viewing, reordering and rewording your real projects and experience to match, then writes a cover letter and tracks the application.

Don’t wait for applications alone, either. Reaching out directly to hiring managers with a link to your work often works better for early-career candidates: see how to cold email for a job in 2026.

Try Tailr

Conclusion

You break the experience trap by creating experience yourself: real projects, freelance and volunteer work, open source, internships, contracts, hackathons and projects at your current job. Pick two or three routes, finish something real in each, present it on your resume like a job with results, and apply even when listings ask for a little more than you have. Experience is evidence that you can do the work, and you can start building that evidence this week.