Career Coaching at TripleTen: What It Is and How It Helps You Land a Job

It’s one thing to complete a bootcamp and learn new skills. It’s a whole other thing to shift your mindset and land that first job_{How to Get a Programming Job} in a new field. Coaching can help you bridge the gap. That’s why all TripleTen students are encouraged to sign up for the Career Acceleration course and work one-on-one with a career coach. Daniela Ruiz, interviewed here, is a career coach with TripleTen, and she breaks down exactly how the process works and how you can get the most out of it.

What is career coaching, anyway?

Job searching can feel “really lonely and overwhelming, or discouraging or demotivating at times,” Daniela observes. A career coach serves as a guide and mentor in the job search process: they will help you create stellar job search materials, guide you through networking, practice interviewing, and provide tailored feedback on your specific journey. They also motivate you when you feel stuck and help with accountability.

At TripleTen, students can sign up for the Career Acceleration course, which includes six sessions with a coach. Coaching sessions often start with a comprehensive review of all job search materials: resume, LinkedIn profile_{5 Social Media Strategies to Power Up Your Job Search}, portfolio_{Secrets of a Stellar Portfolio: Guidelines and Checklist}, cover letter, and more. Then, Daniela or one of her fellow coaches helps grads create a “personalized job search strategy, taking into consideration their background, their whole skillset, why they got into this new field, where they want to go with this new career. It's really personalized and tailored to who they are and where they want to go.”

Your coach helps you fill in the gaps of what employers are looking for_{What Employers Want From Bootcamp Grads}. The goal, Daniela says, is that “by the time grads launch their active job search period, they feel equipped, ready, and confident in what they have to offer. We review their progress, we review their applications, or if they have any blockers, we work with them individually to see how we can help them get unstuck: how they can follow up, how they can get ahead of the curve.” 

This is not a passive process: a coach can only help you as much as you’re willing to put in. But if your inner voice starts telling you that you’re not cut out for this, a coach can be that “person in your corner, reminding you of your skills and what you can do,” suggesting new strategies and encouraging you to keep going. 

What if I still don’t know what job I want?

You’ve gone through a bootcamp, you learned the skills, but you’re still not sure what sort of work you want to do. Can a career coach help with that? Definitely, says Daniela. She says she especially loves the sessions where she can reframe a student’s internal story and give them better clarity about pursuing the career they want. 

One major piece in her coaching is helping students embrace their previous career or their hobbies and using those skills or passions as bridges into a new career in tech: “They can actually use everything that they are and everything that they've done in their future career. They can look for roles within industries that they're not only interested in, but also passionate about and where they can make a difference.” 

For example, Tiffany Hall_{A Teacher Switches to Tech to do Even More for Students: Tiffany Hall’s TripleTen Story} worked as a teacher for 15 years before deciding to make the switch to coding. After completing her bootcamp, she landed a job at Scholastic: “As an educator, it’s like working for Google or Disney. It’s just that level,” she says. It was her background in education and her passion for helping students – not just her technical chops – that made her a standout candidate for the software development role.

Daniela always reminds job seekers that “a recruiter is not likely to remember you by the tech stack; they are going to remember you by who you are, and the stories that you can tell.” 

How coaching helps you land the job

Among the many ways a job coach can help you, interviewing may be the most important. It’s very rare for an employer to give you feedback after a failed interview. This is why Daniela and her fellow coaches spend time on mock interviews. Most of the common interview questions –  “tell me about yourself,” “give an example of how you solve problems” – come up at every interview. By practicing them ahead of time (and even watching a recording of themselves answering the questions!) grads work through the best way to answer these questions so they sound confident, and don’t get stuck.

Bootcamp grad Kyle Kolodziej_{In QA and Never Looking Back: Kyle Kolodziej’s TripleTen Story} credits career coaching with helping him land his job in tech. He explored many roles before starting a bootcamp: chef, food truck manager, wine sales rep, project manager. He even got a second bachelor’s degree in cyber security, but the work was draining and frustrating. He decided to rethink his path into tech, and landed on QA engineering. When it came time for the job search,“[A coach and I] literally went over everything that I accomplished at my last role and did a hard narrow-down in rewording different aspects of things to make my resume much more effective.”  

After a month of applications, a small fintech company reached out to interview him. Kyle aced it thanks to practice sessions with his coach: “The interview went well, thanks to the help from TripleTen. And while I was missing some of the skills that they were probably looking for, they were more impressed with how I interviewed and the knowledge that I was bringing to the table.” He got the job, and finally found his perfect fit in tech.

The importance of dedication

Daniela encourages bootcamp grads to embrace the job search in every part of their life — as opposed to treating it like a part-time pursuit. She says that even if you send in three applications a week, “if you're really committed to it, those three applications might make all the difference, because you're going to pay attention to every detail. If you’re always focused on your search, you're going to naturally connect with people, and you're going to have meaningful conversations about your career.”

When a person is focused and they know what they want, you can tell. It shows in conversations, it shows in written communication, it shows in their resume and it shows on their LinkedIn. Daniela Ruiz, career coach

A present from our coaches to you

Built using our coaches’ expertise, this free get-hired-in-tech checklist will help you work through all the steps to start your tech job search.