One of the strangest things about the job market is that sometimes you need experience to get the job that is supposed to give you experience. We joke about entry-level roles asking for two or three years of experience, but the interesting problem here is that hiring is risky. A CV can only tell an employer so much about whether someone will actually be good at a job, so companies look for signals that reduce some of that uncertainty. A degree is a signal. From the employer's side, that makes sense. If you're choosing between two people and one has already done the job elsewhere, there is simply less uncertainty around that person. If experience is evidence of ability, what other evidence can someone produce before they have experience? By now, you should have gotten the point. Portfolios, internships and apprenticeships are more important than we sometimes give them credit for. A portfolio, for example, allows someone to produce evidence without waiting for a company to hire them first. Someone may never have had “Research Analyst” as a job title, but if they have spent months publishing good research, there is something tangible to evaluate. The same applies to writing, design, software, marketing, data and other fields where at least part of the work can be demonstrated independently. Internships give a companies a lower-risk way to see how someone actually works before making a larger commitment. For apprenticeships, you aren't expected to arrive as the finished product. Learning how to do the job is part of the arrangement. None of these completely replaces experience, and they won't work equally well for every profession. There are jobs where previous experience genuinely matters, and there are skills that are difficult to demonstrate outside a real working environment.