Getting experience is an important part of starting your career as a young adult. The earlier you start acquiring experience for your resume, the better. It sounds difficult and it will require work, but you can start wherever you are on your career path. If you just learnt a new skill, putting it into considerable amounts of use is expedient.
1. Experience proves you're more educated than School made you.
We all know that schools aren't really preparing you enough for industry level work. Most of the problems you learnt to solve in school are already solved in real life. And that renders school knowledge redundant. You need new knowledge. An internship or an on-the-job experience will provide that knowledge. These are good ways to get experience. Streetwise is important.
2. Practical application proves your competence.
Whether you had to volunteer, fund the requirements yourself, or work for very long it short time, the opportunity to apply what you learnt is not to be underestimated.
A computer programmer needs excess practice, obviously. Everyday, new technologies surface and old ones get upgraded. Just working with already gotten knowledge puts you in a place where you can easily be replaced. And after learning new skills, the next step is to apply them. Transform all your codebases to the new language. It is an expository process.
3. Employers want people with experience
It's rough to be rejected without being given a chance to prove yourself, but the employment process is all about elimination.
The best way to get through is to not give them a reason to eliminate you.
If you self-learnt a skill, apply it. Add that to your portfolio. Use apps like LinkedIn to record your experience, and also have an active CV where you specify all your experiences and skills after mastering them. I do that with Google docs and it's easy to apply for a gig by just sharing a link to the employee.
