I came to Germany as an international worker with self-taught frontend skills and a portfolio built from online courses and personal projects.
It felt almost impossible. The rejections arrived quickly, hundreds of them. Some were automatic, some were short and polite, and a few were detailed enough to hurt. Every time a good application stopped, I had to tell myself not to read too much into it. What helped was persistence and using many channels at the same time. I was active on LinkedIn, on Xing, and on the German Make-it-in-Germany program, which exists to help international workers enter the local job market. LinkedIn gave me the best results. I improved my profile, started to contact recruiters directly, and put my portfolio links at the top. I tried to treat every rejection as information and not as a verdict. If my HTML and CSS projects got no attention, I worked more on JavaScript. If a cover letter did not work, I wrote it again. Slow work without glamour, but methodical. In the end a company was willing to look past my unusual background. The interview process had four rounds, from a technical skills test to a conversation about cultural fit, and each one felt like a real test of my progress. When the offer arrived for ↓