IT Students: The Practical Skills You Actually Need to Get Hired

There's a gap between what university teaches and what companies actually need — and most students only discover it during their first job interview, or worse, their first week on the job.

This isn't a criticism of universities. Theory matters. But theory is a foundation, not a finished house. The students who get hired fast and grow quickly are the ones who built on top of that foundation while they still had the time and safety net of being a student.

Here's what that looks like in practice.

The Mental Shift: From "Passing" to "Shipping"

In university, the goal is to pass. Write code that runs, submit before the deadline, get the grade.

In a company, the goal is to ship. Write code that other people can read, maintain, and build on. Deploy it without breaking production. Explain your decisions in a team meeting.

That shift — from code that runs to code that works in a system with other people — is the hardest adjustment most new graduates face. Everything else in this post is about preparing for exactly that shift.

1. Git Is Not Optional

If you've been submitting assignments as ZIP files or storing everything in one folder, start here.

Git is the foundation of collaborative software development. Every professional engineering team uses version control. If you don't know Git going into an interview, you will stand out — not in a good way.

The basics you need:

git clone        # Get a copy of a repo
git add          # Stage your changes
git commit       # Save a checkpoint
git push / pull  # Sync with the team
git branch       # Work without breaking the main code
git merge        # Combine your work back in

The real-world skill beyond the basics:

Conflicts. When two people edit the same file, Git can't decide for you. You have to read both versions, understand the intent, and resolve it manually. This is a core daily skill in team environments and it takes practice to do calmly.

Get a GitHub account. Make it green. Push your projects there, even small ones. A visible commit history is more convincing than any bullet point on a resume.

2. Learn to Read (and Write) APIs

Modern software is APIs talking to other APIs. Frontend calling backend. Mobile app calling a server. Service A calling service B.

If you don't understand REST APIs, you will struggle in almost any web or mobile development role. If you want a deep dive, check out What is REST API? Complete Guide for Developers.

What you should be able to do:

• Make HTTP requests (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE)
• Understand request/response structure, headers, and status codes
• Build a simple API endpoint (in any language or framework you know)
• Read API documentation (Swagger, Postman Collections) and call an unfamiliar API on your own — OpenWeatherMap, GitHub API, or any public API you've never used before

# A basic GET request using curl
curl https://api.example.com/users/1
 
# Expected response
{
  "id": 1,
  "name": "Chanh Le",
  "email": "chanh@example.com"
}

Tools like Postman or HTTPie let you explore APIs without writing a single line of code. Use them. Understanding status codes like 200 OK, 401 Unauthorized, and 404 Not Found is table stakes for any developer role.

3. SQL Is Still Everywhere

You probably learned SQL in your database class. You probably forgot most of it the day after the final exam.

Revisit it. SQL is one of the most consistently relevant skills across every type of software company, from startups to enterprises. Almost every product stores data in a relational database somewhere. For a hands-on refresher, see SQL Fundamentals: SELECT, JOIN, and Subqueries.

The queries that actually come up:

-- Get all active users with their latest order
SELECT u.name, o.total, o.created_at
FROM users u
JOIN orders o ON u.id = o.user_id
WHERE u.is_active = true
ORDER BY o.created_at DESC;

Beyond SELECT:

• JOIN — combining data from multiple tables (this is where most students get lost)
• Indexes — why a query is slow, and how to fix it
• Transactions — what happens when two operations need to succeed or fail together

A junior developer who can write clean SQL joins and debug a slow query is worth their salary immediately. Most can't.

4. Understand the Workflow Around Code

Writing code is maybe 40% of a developer's job. The other 60% is everything around it.

Agile and Scrum basics:

Most companies work in two-week cycles called sprints. Every day starts with a quick standup: what did you do yesterday, what are you doing today, is anything blocked?

You don't need a certification. You just need to know:

• What a sprint is
• How to write and estimate a ticket/task
• What "blocked" means and when to say it

Code review:

Before your code gets merged into the main branch, someone else reads it. This is normal, healthy, and not personal. Learning to give and receive code review feedback gracefully is a professional skill that separates good engineers from great ones.

Deployment pipeline basics:

Know what CI/CD means. Understand that pushing code to GitHub doesn't automatically mean users see it. There's a pipeline: tests run, code gets built, it gets deployed to staging, then to production. Know the shape of this even if you don't know every tool.

5. The Art of Asking Questions

This one sounds soft. It isn't.

Bad question:

"Hey, my code doesn't work."

Good question:

"I'm trying to implement JWT authentication. I've set up the middleware, but when I send a request with a valid token, I'm getting a 401. I've checked the token format and it looks correct. I'm not sure if the issue is in how I'm reading the Authorization header or in the signature verification. Here's my code: [snippet]."

The second question tells your senior colleague exactly where to look. It shows you've already investigated. It saves everyone time. It makes you look professional.

The rule: before you ask, spend 15–30 minutes trying to solve it yourself. Google it, read the docs, check Stack Overflow. When you ask, explain what you've already tried.

This habit alone will make you one of the better junior developers in any team.

6. English: At Least Enough to Read Docs

The best documentation, tutorials, Stack Overflow answers, and technical blog posts are in English. The GitHub issues where bugs get fixed are in English. Most of the code comments you'll work with in international codebases are in English.

You don't need to write fluent business emails. You need to:

• Read technical documentation without constant translation
• Search for error messages and understand the answers
• Write clear variable names, comments, and commit messages in English

This is a competitive advantage in Vietnam's tech market. Many developers who are technically strong get stuck because they can't navigate English resources efficiently.

7. Build Something Real

Theory becomes intuition when you build something that has to actually work.

The typical university project — student management system, library management system — teaches CRUD operations, which is a fine starting point. But the projects that get attention from interviewers solve problems that feel real.

Ideas that are simple but impressive:

• A personal finance tracker with charts
• A link shortener with click analytics
• A weather app that fetches live data from an API
• A simple blog or portfolio with a CMS backend

The bar isn't "impressive product." The bar is "they built this, it works, and they can explain every decision they made." That's it.

Put it on GitHub. Write a short README explaining what it does and how to run it. That README is often the first thing a technical interviewer looks at.

8. Intern Early, Fail Safely

Three months of internship will teach you more than a year of self-study. This is not an exaggeration.

In an internship:

• You see how real teams communicate and make decisions
• You work on code that other people have written (usually not clean code)
• You get feedback on your work from experienced engineers
• You learn what you don't know — which is the most valuable thing to learn

The fear most students have: "What if I'm not good enough yet?"

The reality: Internships exist precisely because companies expect you to not be good enough yet. Your job is to learn fast and ask good questions, not to perform like a senior developer.

Apply before you feel ready.

The Comparison That Matters

Where to Start

If you're overwhelmed, here's the minimum viable path:

1. Create a GitHub account and push your next assignment there instead of submitting a ZIP
2. Build one project that calls a real API (weather, currency, anything)
3. Practice SQL with a free tool like sqliteonline.com
4. Apply for internships before you feel ready — that feeling doesn't go away on its own

The gap between "student who can code" and "developer who can work" is smaller than it looks. It's mostly mindset, habits, and a bit of deliberately uncomfortable practice.

Start now. You have more time than you think, and less than you'd like.

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