Things You Need To Know
Before you write your first line of code — read this. Especially if you're coming from a non-IT background.
A lot of students enter IT with beliefs planted by relatives, YouTube thumbnails, or friends who "heard from someone" that IT is easy money, or let's just be honest, being inspired by sci-fi movies that make no sense realistically. Let's address every single one of them directly.
People think IT is just using computers. They confuse using technology with building it. These are completely different things.
You will spend hours debugging a single error. You will read documentation that makes no sense at first. You will fail repeatedly before things click.
Everyone has heard about IT salaries. Fresh graduates think they'll earn six figures within a year of graduating.
The market is flooded with graduates. Good pay comes to those who have real skills and a strong portfolio — not just a degree. A certificate alone means very little.
Many students believe finishing the degree is the finish line. Just submit assignments, pass exams, done.
Employers look at your GitHub, your projects, what you've built. Two candidates with the same degree — the one with real projects wins every time.
People think learning one language or tool is enough. "I know Python, I'm sorted."
Technologies that were industry standard 3 years ago are now being replaced. You will need to keep learning for the rest of your career — that's just the nature of this field.
In IT, certifications are a big part of your career, especially in fields like networking, cloud, and cybersecurity. But here's what nobody tells you: most certifications expire every 2–3 years.
That means you don't just study once. You renew. You retake. You pay again. AWS, Cisco CCNA, CompTIA Security+, Microsoft Azure, all of them have renewal requirements. This is a recurring cost of both time and money throughout your entire career.
Your bachelors curriculum was designed years ago. By the time you graduate, some of what you studied may already be outdated. No college can update its syllabus as fast as the industry moves.
This means you are personally responsible for staying current. Follow industry news, build side projects with newer tools, and don't rely solely on what's taught in class. Your lecturers may be excellent, but the industry waits for no one.
If you failed your medical entrance and switched to IT, that's completely valid. But be honest with yourself: students who chose IT from the start often have a head start. They may have been coding since school. You haven't.
This gap is absolutely closeable! But it requires extra effort in your first year. Don't pretend the gap doesn't exist. Acknowledge it, then work harder than everyone else to close it. The students who succeed in this situation are the ones who stop comparing and start building.
You can pass every exam in your program with high marks and still struggle to build a working project from scratch. Academic performance and industry readiness are two different things.
Assignments are structured problems with a known answer. Real work is messy, undefined, and requires you to figure things out independently. Start building your own projects outside of coursework as early as possible, even if they're small and broken.
At some point, probably in your early semesters, you will look around at your classmates, look at things online, and feel like you don't belong here. Like everyone else understands something you don't. This feeling is called imposter syndrome, and almost every developer has felt it.
The solution is not to feel more confident. The solution is to keep building things anyway. Confidence comes after action and not before it.
AI is not replacing developers.
It's replacing developers who don't use AI.
Tools like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude are now part of daily development work. Students who refuse to learn how to work alongside AI tools will be at a disadvantage. Students who use AI as a crutch without understanding fundamentals will also struggle.
The sweet spot is this: understand the fundamentals deeply, then use AI to work faster. AI can write code — but it cannot decide what to build, debug complex system behaviour, or understand your client's actual problem. That's still your job.
Basic code writing is being automated. Jobs that involve only repetitive coding tasks are at risk. What's growing in demand are roles that require human judgment — system architecture, security, UX thinking, prompt engineering, and managing AI pipelines.
Regardless of which programme you're in, start learning what AI cannot easily replace: problem definition, communication, debugging complex systems, and building things end-to-end.
Local IT jobs in Nepal are growing, but slowly. The competition for good local roles is intense because the number of IT graduates far exceeds available positions at quality companies.
The students who do well are typically those who build skills strong enough to work remotely for international companies or freelance globally. This is entirely possible, but it requires a level of skill significantly above the average graduate. Build with this goal in mind from day one.
Here's what actually works — not motivational fluff, but concrete steps based on what successful self-taught and college-taught developers consistently do.