How to translate non-CS work experience
Getting CS work experience can be hard and depends on various external factors like the job market and economic conditions. If you can get experience in a different industry/work setting, you can always highlight the skills you learnt in a manner that translates well to the CS world. Something to keep in mind is that every recruiter, hiring manager or professor was a student once and they have probably held a non-cs position, so this could become the common ground you need to relate with the other person and feel more comfortable with them.
In a non-CS position, you will still learn the same soft skills someone in a CS position learns. If you hold a retail position, you will learn how to work in a fast-paced work environment and effectively handle customers. You will also use the software in your job and use this as a chance to identify the pain points and come up with a better software design. This could turn into a hackathon project! With how omnipresent software is, most jobs will use some software for data processing, inventory management or even customer relation management. All these software are built by companies you want to intern with, so you have the unique advantage of knowing the pain points users experience and can brainstorm ways of improving it.
To effectively highlight the skills you learnt in a retail/customer service/any other non-CS-based position, I recommend focusing on the soft skills and people management you did. Also, you should highlight your problem-solving and time-management skills.
Opportunities on Campus
Recruiters often look for extracurricular experience or any other commitments to your university campus. Work studies and on-campus clubs are a great way to showcase this. As a work-study in the CS department, building out this guide became my primary project and turned into a large-scale research and documentation experience. Similarly, there are other work-studies such as being a residence porter, front-desk assistant and event program coordinator, that can give you some work experience and also show an extracurricular commitment to campus.
Graduating without work experience
If you come up to your last year and realize you don’t have any relevant experience, you can still build out projects [refer to the Projects guide] and showcase any work experience you have. It might be harder to be a competitive candidate against others who have CS internships, but it is still possible to get a full-time CS job.
Apprentice/Fellowships/Rotational programs
Apprenticeship/Fellowship/Rotational programs are typically 2-year programs that give you the skills necessary to learn on the job and often focus on people with limited/no work experience. Some examples include Google’s BOLD program and LinkedIn’s APM program.