Is it enough to know a single programming language or framework, to get your first job? Let’s talk about that today.
A question I often get asked is, “Is it enough to know programming language x, or framework y, to get a first job? Or to get you a first job?” Well, the answer is again, it depends. It depends what you’re focused on, how popular that programming language is, how much you’ve absorbed the skills, how well you’re ready for it, and the same applies for the framework.
In general, one programming language can be enough to get to a junior programming level position, but the same can also be said for a framework, but there’ll be less opportunities. So, in other words, if you specialize in one framework, then you’re restricting yourself to that job obviously, are using that particular framework or technology.
So, in general, I would suggest that, yes, you would be ready to get a job, but there’ll be less jobs if you focus on only a particular thing. A good way to look at it, is to learn a programming language, get that skill on your resume, and learn one or more frameworks which usually are a lot quicker to learn, than the whole programming language, and that can set you up, particularly if you pick the right frameworks and programming languages. In terms of picking the right one’s, focus on very popular languages, Java, could be a good example, C++ is another, very popular language, Python, there’s lots of other examples, but these three examples of very popular, programming languages, and obviously because they are so popular, that means there’s more opportunities in general for programmers to get jobs based on those particular programming languages.
Likewise with the frameworks, you can pick a framework that’s in heavy use, based on one or more of those programming languages, add that to your resume and that again sets you up, to give you greater opportunity to get a programming job. So in general, yes, knowing one programming language and or one framework, can be enough to get you a programming job, but depending on how many you do learn, will give you a much better opportunity, to go wider and actually get more opportunities. Now that’s not to say you should learn, heaps of different programming languages, I’m not saying that, on heaps of different frameworks, but just try and focus on technologies and programming languages that you can see are very popular, to give yourself the greatest possible chance, of getting employed.
I hope that helped, if you’ve got any questions feel free to leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.