How to Build Your Career While You’re Still a Student

In the name of Allah.

A lot of students send me more or less the same questions: Where do I start? What should I learn? How does the co-op internship work? And is AI going to take my job or not?

So I decided to collect the answers I usually give into one post, instead of repeating them every time. This isn’t idealized advice out of a textbook — this is what I actually did as a software engineering student, and what I’m still doing today.

One note before we start: success comes from Allah first and last. The steps below are the effort you put in; the rest is up to Him.

My story, briefly

I’m a software engineering student, and I never limited myself to the university curriculum — university gives you the fundamentals, but the market wants something extra.
I picked the Full Stack track and followed a ready-made roadmap from roadmap.sh/full-stack, along with free YouTube courses.
I built real projects with my own hands — including my personal site, sb.sa — and those projects spoke for me before I ever had to speak for myself.
I did my co-op internship with the title Software Engineer in web development.
Today I work as a Full Stack software engineer at a company, and at the same time I teach programming to a lot of students.
And my LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/saadbatwa — you’ll find my work and updates there.

The takeaway from my story: nothing magical happened. There was a track I chose, a roadmap I followed, projects I built, and years where I never stopped learning.

1. Pick your track before you learn anything

The biggest mistake a student makes is learning at random. A course here, a language there, and a year later they realize they haven’t moved forward in any direction.

There are many different fields in our major: web development, mobile, data, cybersecurity, AI, DevOps, and more. So the first thing to do is pick one.

How do you choose? Sit down with any AI chat and talk it through: What career tracks are available for my major? What does the day-to-day work look like in each one? What suits someone who likes this and doesn’t like that?

And if you try a field and don’t enjoy it — that’s fine, switch. Trying something isn’t a loss; it’s part of how you decide.

2. Make sure there’s real demand for your track

Once you’ve picked a field, make sure it’s actually in demand before you give it two years of your life.

The method is simple: open LinkedIn and search for the job title. See how many listings come up, what technologies the listings ask for, and what experience level they want. This is the most honest source you have — more honest than any “best fields of the future” video.

A tip: search in English. The content and the job opportunities in English are many times what you’ll find in Arabic.

3. Follow a roadmap, don’t learn at random

Once you’ve decided, don’t invent your own path. People have gone before you and laid out the road.

roadmap.sh — roadmaps for most tracks, laid out step by step.
CS50 from Harvard — if you feel your computer science fundamentals are weak, this gives you an excellent foundation, and it’s free.

After that: for every step on the roadmap, find a course that fits it. You can ask an AI to recommend one from YouTube or Udemy. Don’t buy ten courses at once — take the step, master it, then move on.

4. A project matters more than a certificate

This is the most important point in the whole post.

Certificates alone aren’t enough. The person hiring you doesn’t want to see ten course-completion certificates — they want to see something working that you built.

After each stage of the roadmap, build a small project that applies what you learned.
Push everything to GitHub under an account with your real name.
Write a clear README for every project: what it does, what technologies it uses, and how to run it.
If you can, publish at least one project that’s open to the public (a working link) — a live link makes a big difference.

One complete, working project is stronger than ten courses stacked up on a résumé.

5. The co-op internship and your résumé

The co-op internship: take it seriously, because it’s usually your first real contact with the market, and a lot of people get hired by the same company they trained at.

Start applying early, well before the semester — don’t wait until the last month.
It’s fine to apply for any title close to your field; don’t box yourself into one title.
Before you choose a company, read the experiences of people who trained there: internship-ratings.sb.sa has reviews of internship experiences at a lot of companies.

And don’t wait for the co-op internship in the first place: you can train on your own from your second or third year, without going through the university at all. A lot of students don’t know this is even possible.

How?

Contact the company directly: the official company email, or the email of an employee working in the same field you want to train in.
Or — and this is usually the best option — go see them in person.
And tell them simply: I’m a student interested in this field, I want to learn more, train with you, and contribute however I can.

Companies themselves like this kind of person — someone persistent who wants to learn on their own. Even if they turn you down, you’ve lost nothing, and you move on to the next one.

And here’s how the person hiring you ranks things, from strongest to weakest: real work experience (even an internship) → projects you built yourself → courses. Courses matter as a starting point, but on their own they aren’t enough.

Your résumé when you have no work experience: it’s normal not to have experience, so the place where you make up for it is projects.

One page, in English, without excessive decoration.
Order it: contact info (with GitHub and LinkedIn links) → education → projects → technical skills → any courses or certificates.
For each project: a line or two on what it does and with which technologies, plus a concrete result if possible.
Skills: write what you actually know. Don’t list a technology you can’t answer questions about in an interview.
Tailor the résumé for every job you apply to — take the wording from the listing itself and use it, as long as it genuinely applies to you.

6. Networking and continuous learning

Work doesn’t always come from applying to listings; a lot of it comes from the people who know you.

LinkedIn: keep it updated, with a decent photo and a clear headline, and share what you’re learning. Posting a project or a summary of something you learned makes you visible without doing anything artificial.
Tech communities: go to meetups and communities in your field, participate, and ask. Most people are willing to help if you ask a respectful, clear question.
Ask smart questions: before you ask, try and search first. Then ask a specific question. Someone who asks “teach me programming” can’t be helped; someone who asks a precise question gets ten people answering.
Learning doesn’t stop after you’re hired. Technologies change every year, and whoever stops learning falls behind fast.

7. AI: don’t fear it, use it

This is the question I get most these days: “They told me AI is going to replace programmers — should I continue or change my major?”

Straight talk:

So far, every company still has programmers and still pays them salaries, and those programmers themselves use AI in their work. Same thing in design and other fields.
You’re expected to use AI to get more done — but what’s required is a result of good quality, and that only happens if you understand what you’re doing.
The full-replacement talk: nobody knows whether it will happen or not, but right now it’s not possible. Because even if it did happen, the manager isn’t going to sit there programming and debugging himself — he’ll bring in a person whose job is to work with these tools.
And don’t assume some other field is “safer.” Even AI specialists themselves may fall under the same argument — except for the people working at the companies that actually build these models.

So the bottom line: master the fundamentals, and use AI as a tool that speeds you up, not as a substitute for your understanding.

What if I don’t like programming itself?

This question comes up a lot, and the answer is: the major isn’t limited to writing code.

There are adjacent tracks that benefit enormously from your technical background, such as: product management, technical project management, UI/UX design, business analysis, and technical support and solutions. All of them need someone who understands the technology, even if they don’t write code daily.

Give programming a real try first, and if you’re sure it isn’t for you, move to one of these tracks with a clear conscience.

Common mistakes — save yourself the trouble and avoid them

Learning without a goal, and jumping from one language to another every month.
Getting addicted to courses and never building a single project.
Waiting until you feel “ready” to apply — you never will, so apply while you’re still incomplete.
Waiting for the university to arrange your internship, when you could contact companies yourself right now.
Comparing yourself to someone who started three years before you.
Neglecting English, and shutting yourself out of most of the content and opportunities.
Letting AI do the work for you instead of understanding what comes out of it.

Summary

Pick a track → confirm there’s demand for it → follow a roadmap → build projects and publish them → look for real work experience even from your second year → build your network → and keep learning.

All of this is the effort you put in; success comes from Allah alone. May Allah grant you success and guide your steps.