Career service
Pick the wrong target and six months of good work counts for nothing.
We offer personalized career planning services to help you define your career direction and set achievable goals.
- Format
- 1:1 consultation
- Output
- A written 90-day plan
- Covers
- Roles, stack, salary, timing
- Best done
- Before you start applying
The real cost of drifting
Effort is rarely the problem. Direction usually is.
Most people we meet are not lazy and are not short of ability. They are applying to whatever appears in the feed, learning whatever the internet says is hot this month, and hoping the two eventually intersect.
That approach burns the one thing you cannot get back. For a 485 visa holder it is worse than inefficient — the clock is fixed, and a wasted quarter is a quarter of your runway. Choosing a target narrows what you learn, what you build and where you apply, and everything gets faster once it is chosen.
This session is not personality quizzes or generic advice. It is a look at where you actually are, what the Australian market is actually hiring for, and the shortest defensible path between the two.
What we assess
Eight inputs that decide your target
- Where your skills genuinely sit
- A frank technical baseline — not what you have watched, what you can build unaided. Everything else depends on getting this honest.
- Which role families fit
- Front-end, back-end, full-stack, cloud and DevOps, data, testing, support. They have different entry bars, different competition and very different day-to-day work.
- What the market is actually posting
- Real listing volumes and stack demand in your city, rather than what social media claims is in demand.
- Realistic salary bands
- What junior, mid and senior actually pay in Australia, so you neither undersell yourself nor price yourself out of a first role.
- Your visa and timing constraints
- 485, student, PR pathway or citizen — each changes which employers will engage and how urgently you should move.
- The gap between here and hireable
- The specific skills, projects and evidence missing for your target — written down, ordered, and estimated in weeks.
- Location and work style
- Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, remote or hybrid. This changes both the volume of roles and the level of competition.
- What you can actually sustain
- Hours a week, alongside work or study. A plan you abandon in three weeks is worse than a slower plan you finish.
How it runs
One session, then a plan you can actually follow
- 01
Baseline
We work through what you can build unaided, what you have shipped, and what your CV currently claims. No test, but no flattery either.
- 02
Market map
We look at live listings for your city together — volume, required stacks, seniority language and how many are genuinely open to juniors.
- 03
Shortlist two targets
A primary target and a realistic adjacent fallback. Two, never five — a scattered target list is the same as no target.
- 04
Write the 90-day plan
Skills, projects, CV changes and application volume, broken down by fortnight, with what "done" looks like for each.
- 05
Review and correct
Plans meet reality. We check progress against the plan and adjust the target if the market answers differently than expected.
Direction matters
The same six months, two ways
| Without a plan | With a target | |
|---|---|---|
| What you learn | Whatever is trending — a little of everything, mastery of nothing | Only what your two target roles actually list |
| What you build | Tutorial projects that look like everyone else's | One or two projects that answer your target job ad directly |
| Where you apply | Anything with "junior" in the title | A defined list you are genuinely competitive for |
| Your CV | One generic version sent everywhere | Versions written for the roles on your list |
| At month six | Broad, shallow, and hard to place | Specific, evidenced, and interviewing |
What you keep
A document, not a conversation you half remember
The written plan
- Your primary target role and one realistic fallback
- The skill gaps between you and each, in priority order
- A fortnight-by-fortnight schedule for the next 90 days
- Salary bands to expect, and what to say when asked
And the working material
- A shortlist of employers and job boards worth your time
- The project brief for what to build next, and why that one
- A weekly application target that is sustainable
- A review point to check the plan against reality
Who this is for
Four common situations
- Finishing study, no direction chosen
- You can code but do not know which role to aim at. This is the cheapest hour you will spend all year.
- On a 485 with the clock running
- Timing drives everything. We plan backwards from your visa expiry rather than forwards from today.
- Employed, but underpaid or stuck
- You have local experience. The question is which move raises your band, and what evidence it needs.
- Changing careers into tech
- Your previous field is an asset if pointed at the right roles — domain knowledge beats a generic junior profile.
Questions
Before you book
Will you just tell me to do a bootcamp?
No. Plenty of people leave with a plan that involves no course from us at all — a specific project, a CV rewrite and a target list is often the entire answer.
I already know I want to be a developer. Is this still useful?
"Developer" is not a target. Front-end at an agency, back-end at a bank and full-stack at a startup want different evidence and pay differently. That is what gets decided here.
What if the market changes?
The plan has a review point built in. Targets are meant to be corrected against real responses, not defended.
Do I need to bring anything?
Your CV if you have one, and two or three job ads that appeal to you. If you have neither, come anyway — that is a useful starting point in itself.
Decide the target before you spend the quarter
One session is usually enough to replace guessing with a plan you can act on this week.