If your teenager has started talking about becoming a software engineer, you may already be thinking about what that career path could look like. Or perhaps your college student is studying computer science and you’re wondering what the job market will look like when they graduate.
The good news is that you don’t need to become your child’s career coach—or hover over their job search—to be helpful. One of the most useful things a parent can do is help a young person understand what employers are actually looking for and develop the skills, habits, and independence they’ll need to navigate the process themselves.
The software engineering job market is more competitive than it once was. Knowing how to code is still important, but today’s candidates need more than technical skills. They also need to communicate clearly, solve problems, work with others, understand the products they’re building, and demonstrate that they can learn independently.
Whether you’re helping a high schooler think about career preparation, supporting a college student as they build experience, or simply trying to understand what the tech job market looks like, here are some things worth knowing.
Technical Skills Aren’t the Whole Package
Most job search advice for software engineering is so focused on coding that it can give students the impression that technical ability is the only thing they need to develop. But if your child is interested in this career, it’s worth encouraging them to think beyond simply learning to code.
In practice, technical performance is necessary but not sufficient. Candidates who do well on the coding portion but struggle with system design questions, behavioral interviews, or simply explaining their thinking clearly are regularly passed over despite their technical ability.
Hiring at most software companies evaluates multiple things at once: how you solve problems, how you think about building larger systems, how well you communicate under pressure, and how you work with other people. Preparing for only one of those dimensions is one of the most common reasons capable candidates do not get offers.
Look Beyond the Code
If your child is interested in software engineering, it can be easy to picture the career as mostly sitting at a computer and writing code. My partner does plenty of that, but his work also sometimes involves hardware and testing how the software performs in the real world. That can be a helpful thing to explore with a teenager who’s thinking about a career in tech. Software engineers aren’t just building code for the sake of building code. They’re solving problems and creating tools that people and businesses actually use, and that involves testing too.
What kinds of problems would your teen enjoy solving? Are they interested in finance, healthcare, education, gaming, artificial intelligence, or something else? Learning more about those industries can help them figure out what kinds of software projects might interest them.
For example, financial technology companies are using software for everything from bookkeeping and payroll to tax preparation and financial reporting. Intuit’s guide to getting a job in software engineering offers some examples of how technology is changing the financial industry.
Your child doesn’t need to know exactly what they want to build at 18. But helping them stay curious about how technology is being used in the real world can give their technical education some context—and might even help them discover an area of software engineering they’re particularly excited about.
As Careers Progress, the Questions Get Bigger
Your child doesn’t need to master system design before their first job. But it’s helpful to understand that software engineering can become increasingly complex as a career progresses.
Entry-level candidates may be asked to demonstrate coding and problem-solving skills. More experienced engineers may be asked to think about architecture, scalability, reliability, and how different parts of a system work together.
System design questions ask candidates to think through how they would build something at scale: how a payment system stays reliable under load, how a search feature handles millions of queries, or how a notification service manages delivery across different devices. There isn’t always one right answer. Instead, these questions give interviewers a chance to see how someone approaches a complicated, open-ended problem.
For parents, the takeaway isn’t that your teenager needs to start studying system design now. It’s that a career in software engineering involves continually learning and tackling increasingly complicated problems. That’s a very different skill from simply knowing how to write code. My cousin (who also works in software engineering) said that the best way to get a job in the field is not be an expert at coding, but to learn how to problem solve. It’s easy to learn coding languages; it’s hard to learn how to problem solve and keep learning.
A Portfolio Speaks Louder than a Resume
One of the best things you can encourage your child to do during school isn’t simply to collect credentials, but to build things. An organized GitHub profile can give an employer another way to see how a candidate approaches real projects. If your teen has a portfolio of well-documented projects that show real independent problem-solving, that tells a story that a resume cannot. Projects can be particularly useful in demonstrating that the candidate identified a problem themselves, found their own data sources, and made their own design decisions rather than simply following a course assignment or replicating a tutorial.
This is something parents can encourage long before their child starts applying for jobs: let them build things simply because they’re curious about how something works. A portfolio full of bootcamp projects that every other candidate also has does not differentiate anyone. One project that addresses a specific real-world problem the candidate genuinely cared about does more for the application than ten identical tutorial replicas.
Help Them Build Connections Before They Need Them
A young person’s professional network doesn’t have to start when they submit their first job application. College professors, classmates, internship supervisors, open-source collaborators, local tech groups, and other people they meet through their interests can all become part of that network.
For parents, this is less about finding your child’s next job for them and more about encouraging them to participate in communities where they can meet people in their field. Contributing to open-source projects, participating in developer communities, and attending local tech meetups can help them build relationships naturally.
Those connections may eventually lead to job opportunities or referrals, but just as importantly, they give young people a chance to learn what working in the industry is actually like.
Learn to Talk about their Experiences
Technical ability isn’t the only thing employers may want to understand during an interview. They may also ask candidates about working with a team, handling a difficult situation, solving a problem, receiving feedback, or learning from a mistake.
This is another area where the skills your child develops long before their first job interview can matter. School projects, volunteer work, part-time jobs, extracurricular activities, and other experiences can all give young people stories they can draw on later.
Encourage your child to think about what they learned from those experiences rather than worrying about having the “perfect” answer. Preparing a few specific examples of collaboration, handling a difficult situation, or learning from a mistake can make these questions much easier to answer.
Teach Them to Apply Strategically
Applying for jobs is a numbers game to some extent, but sending the exact same application to dozens of companies isn’t necessarily the best use of a candidate’s time. Encourage your child to look carefully at the role, understand what the company does, and tailor their application where appropriate.
Spending time researching the technical environment, the team’s work, and the company’s products can help a candidate decide whether a particular position is actually a good fit—and gives them something meaningful to talk about in an interview.
Remind Them to Have Patience
Software engineering job searches can take longer than candidates expect, particularly in a competitive market or when they’re targeting specialized roles. That’s worth talking about before the search begins. A slow response—or a string of rejections—doesn’t necessarily mean your child has chosen the wrong career or isn’t capable of doing the work. Job searches have a lot of variables outside an individual candidate’s control.
Planning for that timeline, maintaining consistent effort throughout rather than front-loading applications and then losing momentum when responses are slow, produces better outcomes than treating the search as something that should resolve quickly. For graduates heading into this process for the first time, or for moms supporting a teenager through it, setting realistic expectations at the start makes the journey considerably less discouraging than discovering the real timeline several weeks in.
Know When to Step Back
Perhaps the most important thing for parents to remember is that a young adult’s job search ultimately belongs to them. You can discuss career options, talk through a difficult interview, proofread a resume if they ask, or remind them that rejection is a normal part of looking for work. You can encourage them to keep learning and help them think through their next steps.
But you don’t need to manage the process for them.
Part of preparing our kids for adulthood is giving them opportunities to make decisions, solve problems, handle disappointment, and figure things out for themselves. A difficult job market can be frustrating, but it can also be an opportunity for a new graduate to learn how to advocate for themselves and build a career on their own.
Your role changes as your child grows. Sometimes supporting them means answering questions. Sometimes it means opening a door or sharing something you’ve learned. And sometimes it means stepping back and letting them walk through the door themselves.
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