16 things computer science and IT majors should do in December to help their 2026 job search

Most computer science students treat December as a pause button or a time to panic about algorithms, but for hiring managers, this is the quiet season where we actually catch our breath and read. The most impactful thing you can do right now is to stop acting like a student who completes assignments and start acting like an engineer who solves problems. Instead of cramming more theory, build one small, unassigned project that serves a real purpose. It does not need to be complex AI or massive infrastructure. It just needs to work, have users, and exist outside a classroom syllabus.

When I look at resumes in January, I gloss over the standard capstone projects because I know the constraints under which they were built. I stop and read when I see someone who identified a mundane problem in their life or community and wrote code to fix it. This signals agency. It tells me you can navigate the messiness of real-world data and deployment without a professor guiding your hand. We can teach you the specific stack we use, but we cannot teach you the instinct to build useful things.

I remember interviewing a junior data scientist years ago who was nervous about her lack of academic publications. During the interview, she casually mentioned a script she wrote over the holidays to parse messy PDF invoices for her father’s small business. She spoke about handling edge cases and the relief on her father’s face when it finally worked. That five-minute story told me more about her potential than her transcripts ever did. We hired her not for what she studied, but for what she finished. Use this month to finish something real.

You should update your portfolio immediately before beginning your internship application process. The majority of summer internships at large corporations become available during December and get filled up quickly. A successful internship in mid-2025 will help establish your professional reputation, which often leads to full-time employment before your graduation in 2026.

Our company has hired multiple entry-level developers who brought valuable experience from their previous internships. The combination of hands-on experience with real-world systems development, team-based Git usage, CI/CD implementation, and supervised production bug fixing demonstrates essential skills that go beyond what classroom projects can offer.

This December, build something small and real. Not a graded assignment, not a tutorial clone, but a tiny project you conceived yourself, even if it’s rough around the edges or never “finished.”

Early in my career, I underestimated how powerful that kind of project could be. It wasn’t until I started preparing for a major job change that I realized interviewers aren’t just hunting for perfect textbook answers; they’re trying to understand how you think, how you make tradeoffs, and how you learn. A simple, self-driven project tells that story better than any polished resume line.

It doesn’t have to be big. A little chatbot, a dashboard, a small API, a Dockerized toy app, or an automation script that saves someone five minutes a day. What matters is that you owned the problem, made design decisions, and can talk through what went wrong as confidently as what went right.

December is a rare window with fewer deadlines, less noise, and more mental space. Use it to build one thing you’re genuinely curious about. That small project might be what sets you apart in 2026.

Use the quiet December period to earn a specific vendor certification, such as the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals or a basic Security+ credential. This small step proves to employers that you have practical initiative beyond your university theory. Simultaneously, update your LinkedIn profile to feature these new credentials prominently. In our hiring process at hagel IT, practical proof of skills often differentiates a candidate more than their degree grades.

The best opportunity to display real-world problem-solving is available to CS and IT majors in December to create or enhance a public project. An effective venue would be a personal site, such as GitHub or a portfolio site. In 2026, your degree will not be sought after by employers, but rather evidence of what you have actually built.

A project that is well-documented (even a small one), like an AI chatbot, a web app, or a data visualizer, will be pretty impressive. It demonstrates initiative, technical prowess, and delivery. It also provides you with physical talking points for interviews and something you can literally mail to recruiters during the slower period of the year, during summer holidays, when competition is not as intense.

The smartest action newly graduating Computer Science and Information Technology majors can take in December is quite straightforward. Ship something that is real.

Do not ship an academic assignment. Do not ship a side project that you have not yet completed. Ship an item that has been polished and refined enough to display publicly (e.g., a working application, tool, script or model, an automated system) that has solved a specific real-world problem.

Evidence of ability is far more significant to hiring managers than a list of potential. A clean GitHub repository and/or a short demo video is far more significant than any potential employer’s resume.

December is typically a slower month. This lower volume typically leads to less delivery pressure to complete projects and to recruit for open positions. It is therefore an excellent month to work, improve, produce and deliver something you can be very proud of.

You will use that project to tell your story for the next few years. It will demonstrate your initiative, technical skill and the ability to see a project completion. It will be this information about you in an employee’s timeline that will allow you to be considered at the very top of the list.

For computer science and IT majors in Ireland, one of the most important things to do in December is to build a portfolio that shows practical, real-world skills rather than relying only on academic achievements. This is especially relevant in industries like ours at Workhub, where companies depend on well-designed digital systems, secure infrastructure, and tools that keep hybrid work running smoothly. Employers want to see clear evidence that candidates can take what they have learned and apply it to real problems.

December is an excellent time for this because the academic workload often eases, and many companies begin preparing their early-year hiring plans. I always encourage students to focus on completing or polishing one meaningful project over the break. It could be a small internal tool, an automation project, or even a valuable contribution to open source. These kinds of projects make a CV stand out because they show initiative and problem-solving, not just coursework.

One student we met built a simple room-booking and notification system after noticing inefficiencies in how small organisations schedule shared spaces. It was straightforward but demonstrated an understanding of user needs, workflow logic, and basic security. That project helped them secure interviews quickly when the January hiring started.

My advice is to treat December as a momentum builder. Use it to create something concrete you can discuss confidently in interviews. Walking into early 2026 with a finished, practical project can make all the difference in securing a strong first role.

I believe the single most valuable move CS and IT majors can make in December is to refresh and showcase a project that proves real world capability. December is ideal because coursework pressure dips and recruiters begin scouting early talent for January pipelines. A polished GitHub repo or a small but thoughtful project built with current tools like containerization, cloud functions or lightweight AI APIs immediately sets you apart. When a recruiter sees a clean README, documented commits and a deployed demo link, it signals professionalism long before you ever speak to them.

To be honest, I learned this watching a former intern who rebuilt a simple inventory app over winter break. He cleaned up the architecture, wrote tests, and pushed a short case study on LinkedIn. That post quietly made its way into a hiring manager’s feed and by early February he had three interviews lined up. What you and I believe does not matter. The fact is that in tech, proof beats promise. December is when you take something you already built and turn it into something that looks employable.

We really have to see a bigger picture here. Recruiters hire for signal, so make sure yours is visible before the 2026 rush begins.

For many CS and IT majors, the best thing they can do in December. You see, something that I have had success with myself as a hiring manager with former engineering hires is to build a new project focused on AI that resembles what companies are actually shipping right now and publicly showcase the project before recruitment ramp-up in January.

December is a perfectly odd window: hiring teams are planning their headcounts for next year, engineers are quieter in their sprints, and recruiters are staging portfolios before any of the positions even open. A solid, relevant, and polished project gives you in-your-face differentiation because almost no student will do anything prior until the spring semester.

The best approach is to select a small but impactful build that demonstrates you understand where the industry is headed: a lightweight RAG system, an LLM feature, an AI automation, a more multimodal prototype, or something similar that has demonstrated you can wrap your arms around modern AI tooling into real software. Post the project to GitHub, write a very short but detailed and technical readme, and concurrently write a breakdown post on LinkedIn of your project. I have seen instances of candidates just getting interview opportunities solely because they illustrated they could solve a real problem with AI vs. a list of coursework.

One of the smartest moves CS and IT majors can make in December is to build one portfolio-ready project that shows their problem-solving skills. Modern employers consistently prefer candidates with more project/work experience compared to those with nothing but a high GPA score.

December is the best month for preparation because students can package the project with clean documentation, a concise README, and then push it to GitHub and share it with recruiters during the first quarter of 2026.

What I’d tell any CS or IT major is to use December to build a small, real troubleshooting portfolio. Not another GitHub repo full of tutorials, but two or three short write-ups showing how you diagnosed and fixed a messy problem. In our world, that might be a broken API feed, a misconfigured MDM profile, or a script that cleaned up inconsistent data. What I’ve noticed is that employers care less about the tech stack and more about how you think under pressure. If you can demonstrate your debugging process in a page or two, you’ll jump to the front of the queue in early 2026.