Practical Hands on Programming Experience

Many companies today need you to have some sort of hands on programming skills in a language of their choice in addition to your educational background. Surf many job listings you'll see phrases like "strong," "experienced," "provable" and more when it comes to the type of programmer a company is aggressively seeking. So how do you jump in and gain the hands on experience beyond school that you need?

Open Source Projects
Open source projects are projects that you register to work on. You volunteer or get assigned a piece to work with based on your experience levels. Open source technology allows anyone with coding experience (from the person who does it at home as a hobby to the PhDs that use smaller simpler programs to relax), to tweak and modify the code as they see fit within the bounds of proper code of ethics. Although it's physically possible to turn open source code into something malicious, that violates every single last code of conduct that exists for proper and respected programmers and other IT professionals. Do a quick search for "beginning open source" or "(language choice) open source." There's tons of stuff out there to get you started. Don't be afraid and dive right in.

Bug Fixes & Plug-ins
Several sites out there programmers the ability to fix bugs in current code and make plug-ins for existing applications. These can be less intimidating to start out with and take less time. Using these can be helpful if you're strapped with your current job or other obligations.

Either way, your skills can stay sharpened and useful to the rest of the world while you seek the all-perfect programming job. It can help you build a portfolio of work in addition to what you did in school and your name will appear in credits for open source project and bug fixes on the internet, helping to support your claims at being a legitimate programmer. Good luck!