Should I focus on getting good grades or on building real-world skills?

Why the advice contradicts itself

Both camps are partly right, because they are describing different situations. For some opportunities, grades are a hard filter. For many others, nobody asks after the first job. The mistake is picking a side without first checking which situation applies to you.

So instead of asking "which is more important?", ask "what grade do my goals actually require, and what happens after I reach it?"

Grades are a threshold

Think of grades as a gate. Below a certain level, some doors close. Above it, raising your grade further opens very few new doors, while the same hours spent on skills open quite a few.

Look at the specific programmes, companies and routes you care about. Many state a minimum. That minimum, plus a small safety margin, is your threshold.

A sensible split

1. Below your threshold: grades come first. Protect them until you are safely above the line. Failing or dropping far below it creates problems that are expensive to fix later.
2. At or above your threshold: keep grades steady with focused, efficient study, and move most spare hours to skills and projects.
3. During exams: grades win, every time. Projects can pause for two weeks.

In practice, for a lot of students I speak with, this looks like roughly the course workload plus eight to twelve hours a week on building outside class.

Make the two overlap

The best students I have mentored do not treat these as enemies. They find ways for one hour to count twice:

• Choose electives that line up with the roles you want, then study them properly.
• Use course projects as portfolio projects by building them properly, with Git, tests and a clean README.
• Pick a final year project that matches your target field and uses a current stack. The Sefism FYP ideas library can help you choose.
• Study fundamentals deeply in courses like data structures, databases and operating systems. They help both your grades and your technical rounds.

What employers actually look for past the filter

Once you are through any grade filter, the conversation is almost never about grades. It is about what you have built, how you think through problems, how you explain decisions and how you work with others. That is why skills compound: they keep being useful at every step of your career, while grades mostly matter at the entry gate.

Watch out for two traps

• The perfectionist trap: spending an extra twenty hours to raise a good grade slightly, while having no projects at all.
• The tutorial trap: skipping classes to watch tutorials, finishing nothing, and ending up with both weak grades and weak skills.

If you notice yourself in either, rebalance at the start of the next month.

Review every semester

Your goals may change. Someone who planned to join a startup may decide on a master's abroad, and the threshold jumps. At the start of each semester, write down your current goals, check their grade requirements and adjust the split.

An example of finding your threshold

Suppose you are fairly sure you want to work at product companies after graduating, but you might apply for a funded master's abroad in a few years. You look up three programmes you would consider and find they ask for a minimum around a certain level, with the best applicants comfortably above it. You look at a few large employers' graduate schemes and find a similar cut-off.

Your threshold is that level plus a small margin. If you are already above it, you study efficiently to stay there and spend your spare hours building. If you are below it, you spend this semester pulling it up, while keeping one small project alive so your skills do not stall.

A self-check each semester

At the start of every semester, write down:

1. My goals for the next two years.
2. The grade requirements attached to those goals, from real sources.
3. Where I am now relative to that threshold.
4. How many hours a week I will give to projects this semester.

If you cannot answer the second question, that is your first task. Guessing is how students end up either over-investing in grades or discovering too late that a door has closed.

If you are still stuck

Read Does a low CGPA ruin my chances of getting a job in tech? if you are already below where you want to be, and How to start your career as a software engineer. If you want someone to look at your specific situation, join Sefism and, as a member, book a 1:1 session.