How to get your first tech job with no experience

Every job advert in tech seems to want two years of experience for an entry-level role. You can't get the experience without the job, you can't get the job without the experience and somewhere in the middle sits you, wondering whether the whole industry is a members' club. It isn't. It's just badly signposted.

Here's what nobody tells you at school. A huge slice of UK tech runs on people who started on a service desk at 18 with nothing but a decent attitude and a habit of fixing things for their family. No degree. What got them in was evidence of curiosity plus the ability to talk to a stressed human being without making them feel stupid - a combination rarer than you'd think, which is exactly why it's worth so much.

This guide is the playbook: what hiring managers screen for, where the junior roles live, how to apply so a person reads your name and what happens once you've hit submit.

What tech employers actually screen for at entry

Strip away the buzzwords in the job spec and an IT manager filling a junior role is looking for four things.

Curiosity with evidence is the first and it outranks everything. Not "I'm interested in computers" - anyone can type that. They want the thing you did about it. You built a PC from parts. You set up a media server on an old laptop. You wrote a Python script to sort your revision notes. You ran a Discord server for two hundred people with bots you configured yourself. You fixed your nan's laptop when it slowed to a crawl and worked out why. Any of those beats a paragraph about passion, because it proves you learn things when nobody is making you.

Communication is the second and it's the one that surprises people. Entry-level tech is a people job wearing a keyboard costume. Most of your day is understanding what someone actually means when they say "the internet's broken", then explaining the fix in words they can follow without feeling patronised. Hiring managers will happily take the candidate who's warm on the phone over the one who knows more, because the technical knowledge can be taught in a fortnight while patience with a frustrated teacher or accountant apparently cannot.

Methodical thinking is the third. Tech interviews and trials are full of questions that have no right answer, only a right process: what would you check first, then what, then what? Guessing randomly is the failure state. Working through the obvious things in order - is it plugged in, does it happen on another machine, when did it last work, what changed - is the entire job, forever, at every level. If you've ever debugged anything patiently rather than smashing at it, say so.

Reliability is the fourth and quietest. Service desks run on tickets and rotas. Someone who turns up at 8am, updates their tickets honestly and says "I'm stuck" out loud rather than sitting on a job for three days beats a brilliant flake every time. Anything proving you show up counts here as it would anywhere.

Notice what's missing from all four: a degree, a certification, a single day of paid employment.

Where the entry-level tech jobs really are

Everyone applies to the famous names. The actual doors are quieter.

Managed service providers are the biggest under-known entry point in British IT. An MSP is a company that runs the IT for lots of other businesses - dentists, solicitors, schools, small manufacturers - and they hire first-line support constantly, because it's the role people move up out of. They're all over every town in the country and most people your age have never heard the term. Search it, find the ones near you, look at their careers pages.

Internal IT teams are the second front. Schools, colleges, universities, councils, NHS trusts, housing associations, law firms, car dealerships, factories - every organisation of any size has someone keeping the machines alive. School and college IT teams in particular often do their big rebuild work across the summer holidays, which is when temporary hands get taken on. Those jobs rarely appear on the glamorous job boards. They appear on the organisation's own website.

Field and installation work is the third. Engineers who go out to sites fitting broadband, tills, network cabling, CCTV or classroom AV kit. Practical, van-based and often happy to train from zero if you're sensible with your hands.

Then the walk-in play, which exists in tech even though nobody uses it. Independent computer and phone repair shops are small businesses with a person behind the counter who does the hiring. Go in at a quiet time, ask if the owner's around, say you're looking to learn the trade and leave a printed CV. Two minutes of mild awkwardness, same disproportionate payoff as any other industry. Repair work also teaches you more about hardware in three months than any course will.

Two more. Apprenticeships are a genuine front door here rather than a consolation prize - our routes into tech guide covers those properly. And volunteering counts: fixing computers at a community centre, running sound for a local theatre group, building a website for a friend's business. Unpaid work is still work history.

How to apply so you actually get seen

Speed first. Junior tech adverts collect applications in bulk and plenty of managers start interviewing before the closing date. An application sent within a day or two lands in a pile that gets read properly. A perfect one sent on the deadline often doesn't.

Tailor visibly but lightly. You don't need a fresh CV per employer. You need one line proving this isn't a copy-paste job: name the company, name what they do, say why. "You support schools across the North West and I'd rather learn on a mixed estate than a single office" tells a manager more than three paragraphs of enthusiasm.

Then the tech-specific move: give them something to click. One line under your name with a link to whatever you've made - a GitHub profile with two small honest projects, a page about your home setup, a folder of photos of the PC you built with a sentence on what you learned. It doesn't need to be impressive. It needs to exist, because almost nobody at your stage bothers and the ones who do get remembered. Our tech CV and cover letter guide has the full skeleton with lines you can adapt tonight.

Use the two-line availability trick as well. Straight under your name, write exactly when you can work: "Available: full-time from June, immediate start possible, happy with early shifts." Service desks are rota-driven, so answering the rota question in the first three seconds is quietly enormous.

One last thing: keep your phone answerable and your voicemail sensible. Missed calls from unknown numbers are how interviews get lost.

Proof you already have

"No experience" nearly always means "haven't translated my life yet".

Raid your own history. Ran the tech crew for the school play? That's live troubleshooting under time pressure with no option to reboot the hall. Sorted the family Wi-Fi so the streaming stopped buffering? That's diagnosis. Moderated a Discord or a game server? That's user management, permissions and dealing with people behaving badly. Built or upgraded a PC? Hardware, static discipline, research, patience. Kept the scoreboard spreadsheet for a sports team? Data handling. Taught a grandparent to video call? That, genuinely, is first-line support and you already know whether you have the temperament for it.

Any customer-facing job you've had counts double here, because it evidences the half of the role most applicants ignore. A year on a till proves you stay calm with frustrated strangers, which is precisely what a service desk is. For the full method of turning school, sport and home life into application material, our sitewide guide to landing your first job walks through it tip by tip.

The rule stands: never write "no experience yet". Write what you've done, in the language of the job you want.

What happens after you apply

Tech hiring has its own shape. The first contact is usually a short phone screen from a recruiter or the IT manager, checking you're real, available and able to hold a conversation. Answer somewhere quiet. Have your availability and one project you can talk about ready.

Some employers add an online test - logic puzzles, pattern sequences, basic numeracy. They test how you think rather than what you know, so work through the practice questions instead of panicking about revision.

Then the interview, which in tech is usually a conversation rather than an exam. Expect scenario questions with no clean answer: a user says their laptop is slow, what do you ask them? Talk through your process out loud, because the process is the thing being marked. Say "I don't know, but here's how I'd find out" whenever it's true. That sentence has never lost anybody a junior role. Prepare properly with our 10 common tech interview questions.

Finally the admin. Right-to-work documents, National Insurance number, references. If the role sits in a school, the NHS or anywhere with regular access to children or vulnerable adults, expect a DBS check as part of onboarding. Normal, employer-arranged, nothing to lose sleep over.

That's the whole game. Four qualities you may already have, a handful of doors nobody told you about and enough speed to answer an advert while it's fresh. Tech is one of the few industries left where a person with no qualifications can be earning properly within two years purely by being curious, calm and reliable. Head back to the tech hub for the rest of the series, or skip the reading entirely and browse live tech jobs while today's adverts are still open.