am i too "past it" to be an engineer?

[vixo]

I have a situation which has been on my mind for a while. Posted here as it's more a chat than jobs, but maybe one of the moderators will move it... anyway, i'm 34 now and although I studied EE and even have a PhD (they give them to anyone these days )  I haven't held an industry job, ever. After finishing my doctorate I worked in a postdoc position briefly, then a (big) recording studio in a technical role, but owing to some unfortunate health circumstances I ended up leaving and pursuing a small business making kit electronics, as it allowed me the time I needed to manage my health. I'm better now and looking for a more serious job which challenges me that I can progress in - a career!

There is one few complicating factor - I've built a life in the city I live in (Berlin) and I'm reluctant to leave. Fortunately there seem to be some pretty good jobs offer here, but I haven't had much luck with applications. My problem seems to be lack of experience in an industry role - I have gotten a fair few interview for positions asking for 2-3 years experience, only to be told I don't really have enough concrete experience for the role, however I have *never* got an interview for an entry level position, so I am led to believe that i am considered over qualified/too old for these.

Most of the positions I'm applying for are related to products, but I have no experience with the emissions testing etc, or mixed signal board design. I'm pretty good with analogue electronics, with programming microprocessors, testing, debugging, mostly practical stuff. I don't have the experience of doing these things within a professional context. My PhD was related to NMR and sensors. My postdoc position was programming Monte Carlo models.

I am interested to hear your takes on what my prospects are in this industry. I enjoy electronics a great deal, but is it unrealistic to expect employment at this point? What can I do to make myself more appealing to prospective employers? Are there areas of work to which I would be suited? Or do I turn my back and start something new?

help/advice/tips much appreciated

 

[Mr. Scram]

It sounds like you may be misrepresenting yourself. You do have experience but but you seem to mainly focus on what you don't have. Guess what, a lot of people don't have all kinds of things! They either omit those or fake it until they make it. I can only assume people are picking up on how you view yourself. You do have engineering experience in the electronics industry. You designed and sold kits.

Instead of selling yourself as a recovered small time kit builder, sell yourself as an engineer with a strong grasp of both the theoretical and practical side of engineering. You have years of experience with dealing with acquisition and marketing. You don't have to lie but you can polish what you have to a shine. If you don't value your skillset others certainly won't.

[rsjsouza]

100% above, with the added gift of entrepreneurship. You saw a life changing condition, analyzed your options and put together a small business within the limits of time, energy and knowledge resources you could muster. Not many people do that.

[james_s]

At least for me, I've found the amount of enjoyment I get out of a job has a whole lot more to do with the company culture and the people I work with than the specific sort of work I'm doing. Anything gets boring after you do it for a while, but it's a lot more tolerable to do boring work in a pleasant environment with people you enjoy being around.

List some personal projects or accomplishments and try to pick out a few good ones to outline. When I interviewed at the place where I currently work they were highly impressed that I had developed and shipped several commercial products on the side, taught myself VHDL and released a handful of open source projects written in that. Even though those particular skills have nothing to do with what my current employer does, it showed that I am self motivated, have an attention to detail, capable of learning new skills and following a project through to completion. Don't decide for yourself that you're unqualified for a job that sounds interesting before you even apply, let the people interviewing you make that decision.

[m98]

Networking can go a long way, especially when you have an "unconventional" career path. You need to get past the usual HR to the people who can really appreciate your skills. Just ring up a few former colleagues from your university, maybe even the guy from undergrad you helped pass that calculus exam (or similar). Odds are, they'll remember you favourably and will be in a position to get you a relevant job.

[EEEnthusiast]

Most of the HR folks in the company are pre-programmed to reject resumes which appears over qualified. Best option is to directly contact some technical managers in a company. Considering what you have done over the years, I think a suitable position for you would be to lead a company's university programs. Many semiconductor companies have university interaction programs where they provide educational kits to the students for free and get to know their feedback and usage. You could use your skills to design those kits better. Later move up the chain to design customer eval kits, reference designs and so on...
Just 2 cents from a fellow engineer.

[Berni]

I think the issue is just advertising yourself in the wrong way.

Sure while you might not have solid tangible experience of being able to say "I worked at X for Y years" you can still put down your own electronics kit business as experience. You can use some sleek writing to make it seam more impressive, doesn't matter if you are overselling your electronic kit gig, it just needs to sound impressive on first glance as long as you don't put in any false tangible numbers that could be seen as lying (Like saying i sold 10 000 kits). You can't put down a false age to seem like someone who just graduated, but you can make it sound like you have the experience.

Experienced electronics engineers are hard to come by, so once you show up in front of company management for the real interview and show you do have experience they will most likely take you in for the role. Best way to get credibility for your claims is to bring stuff you made to the interview. Bring a box of PCBs you made, bring photos of your home lab if you have one, bring printed schematics of your projects.

Big companies tend to have a front line defense of HR drones (aka idiots couldn't see a good engineer even if one hit them in the face). Smaller companies don't have any HR, so you get to speak to someone in charge right off the bat. Try contacting some of these, also use your university ties to find where students are getting practical training or apprenticeships. My university had a professor in charge of that and he maintained a database of where students worked and a list of offers from companies. You might want to contact a company from that list or ask that guy for good places to apply at, as he will have a lot of insider knowledge of it.

[Siwastaja]

Yes you are underselling yourself. Many are faking it either consciously, or relying on pieces of paper. People normally work like this: they sat (or slept) through a uni course on subject X: let's put "expert in X" in the resumee. Or, they had to do Y in company Z; really, it was Bob who did most of the work, but they were part of the team and they know a little about the subject - so, "expert in Y".

And I mean, this isn't even cheating; everybody knows it works this way. And having sat on a course or overseen someone doing a thing means that if you need to actually understand it, you have better starting point to start learning, just-in-time. That's what everybody's doing.

You need to put your experience in the same words than the others. It's not "just" electronic kit business. You are a full stack specialist who can handle the whole circus from design, BOM, manufacturing, to documentation, marketing and customer service. Yes, you know that you have severe limitations. Guess what? So does everybody else. Real gurus exist, but are extremely rare.

Also consider the option to remain in enterpreneurship. You can do wonders there. Find and build the right connections, and you are suddenly a world-class specialist greybeard guru who gets paid $1000/hr for consultation. Or maybe not - but at least you are free of corporate politics. Just do not do the mistake of letting others manipulate you into a joint venture (I say this strongly; I personally saw that even "being very careful" is not enough. Just say no. You don't need to. Do everything for money with clear terms, not for the future growth of a joint company.)

OTOH, a good corporate environment may be a wonderful thing, when you have a good team and management which not only treats you fairly, but also provides you with resources to do good engineering. But this ideal may not be easy to find.

[tggzzz]

There are many good points in the previous replies. I'll emphasise them with a slightly different twist.

The purpose of a covering letter is to get the HR-droid to read your CV.
The purpose of a CV is to get the HR-droid to offer you an interview.
HR-droids are risk averse: they fear being criticised for employing the wrong person more than they seek praise for employing the right person. It can be beneficial if you can submit a CV directly to the engineer/manager, not HR.

So, don't put anything in your CV which is in any way negative; recast it so it appears positive. OTOH, don't leave gaps in your CV. Hence, perhaps:

• I did a PhD because the subject was interesting and I wanted to challenge myself
• not: "a health problem forced me to..."
• but: "I've demonstrated flexibility in the face of changing constraints and opportunities (you can tell them what at the interview)
• and: "demonstrated entrepreneurship by..." (but that might be a disadvantage if the company wants a worker drone)

And do change your CV for the specific job application; try to figure out how what they do/don't want.

At interview have canned answers for the idiotic questions the HR-droids will ask, e.g. "why do you want to work here?".

It looks good if you submit a CV to thje company, rather than to an employment agency: shows initiative, and saves a lot of their money

[tggzzz]

... but I feel uncomfortable faking it in person to people -

"Feeling uncomfortable" will be picked up by the interviewers and it will raise suspicions. The solution is to find ways of not feeling uncomfortable!

I've approached interviews with the attitude that I am interviewing the company as much as it is interviewing me. Since I like finding things out, I enjoy finding things out about the company.

I regard an interview as a reason to blow my own trumpet a little - "look, I've done all this", and "now, come on and ask me interesting questions about it". Intellectual to-and-fro is fun.

for example, I have designed boards with both analogue and digital, but I would not be comfortable saying I had experience with mixed signal board design, because I realise that in almost every case the requirements on a commercial design are far more stringent than what I am designing.

You haven't got experience of most things, so of course you shouldn't claim experience you can't justify! If they expect experience of Frobnitz v2.3, then the job will be limited.

OTOH, you should make them realise that you have easily picked up experience of new things in the past, and will do so again with them. Lack of experience is not a problem! Attitude can be a problem.

Interrogate them to find out what they want and why. Draw on your experience by saying "oh, that's like X in my past". Then ask questions about alternatives that you guess might be relevant - shows initiative.

It's true that I could reveal less about the limits of my experience.

Let them ask about the limits of your experience, and then be open and candid.

You can tell them about your limits, provided you find a way to indicate that in those circumstances you made the best choice.

You can also say "I haven't done X, but I want to in my next job".

Overall: being interviewed can be fun, if you approach it as an intellectual exploration

Oh yes, the first few interviews you have will be poor - it takes time to remember how to be interviewed. Solution: have a few "sacrificial" interviews for jobs that aren't important to you.

[Berni]

Don't worry too much if you are not a mixed signal design graybeard.

Quite often design engineers don't know what they are doing when they start working on a new project in a field they are not used to. But its not about knowing everything going into it, its about being able to figure out things that you need for the project. Sure you might not know how to make the 100V 2A sine pule that this doohickey needs to operate, but if you can sit down with a SPICE simulator for a day and cobble a working circuit together that's good enough. Its about knowing how to take a transistor or opamp and make it do the stuff you want, the rest is just a matter sticking stuff together in SPICE to figure out if it works well enough for the job. Its about being able to figure out the solution, not about knowing the solution from the start.

You can learn what you need on the job as you need it. The difference to a fresh student being that a real engineer has the ability to find the info and learn the things they need on there own, but the fresh student might need a experienced engineer babysitting them and pointing them in the right direction.

[coppice]

You need to be clear, both with yourself and with prospective employers, what you can offer and what you are prepared to accept. There are two big reasons why people who appear over qualified don't get interviewed. One is people expect the interview will be a waste of effort, as the candidate is unlikely to accept a junior job. The other is even if they do accept the job they won't stick around, and further recruitment will be necessary. So, what are you prepared to accept? Did you make that really clear in the interviews you had?

"Most of the positions I'm applying for are related to products, but I have no experience with the emissions testing etc, or mixed signal board design. "

Why would you even bring up your weaknesses, unless directly asked? Most engineers are utterly hopeless at good design for EMI, and doing EMI evaluation, but they still have jobs. Most people only do one type of design really well, and fudge everything else. Focus on what you can do.

[Mr. Scram]

thanks everyone, there is some really good information here, and it's very encouraging to hear.

I am being a little more candid with you all than I would in a job interview (I would for example not make any mention of my ill health for few years) and in general I don't seem to have a problem with CV writing, I can usually get interviews (for experienced positions, never for junior positions), but I feel uncomfortable faking it in person to people - for example, I have designed boards with both analogue and digital, but I would not be comfortable saying I had experience with mixed signal board design, because I realise that in almost every case the requirements on a commercial design are far more stringent than what I am designing. It's true that I could reveal less about the limits of my experience.

In general, I like building kits, apart from being on my own all the time. I would be happy to stay doing this and to build bigger and better things, but I for some reason always assumed it wouldn't get me anywhere in the long run. It's interesting to hear people say otherwise

That's where you go wrong. You feel you're faking it while you actually have the experience. You just short sell it because of arbitrary standards you think the other sets but you actually set yourself. Meanwhile others are shining up their bits of pieces of experience and landing the jobs. You have everything you need except the confidence to sell it. I agree with tggzzz that you should work on also interviewing the company. They need to match you as well as the reverse. It's a two way street and learning what you don't like is an important part. Definitely also practice doing interviews as that's just another skill. Don't treat every one of them as the ultimate challenge but as an opportunity to learn and develop your skillset. It's only a job, not the rest of your life.

[unknownparticle]

These days it's a case of fake it 'til you make it!!  If you believe you can do a given job then just contrive your CV to suit what they want to hear.  Put it this way, if Trump can be US president then anyone can do anything!  Too old at 34, JHC, if thats the case then soon people will have a working life from 20-28 years old then they are on welfare!!  Going back a few generations, it was the case that no one under 45-50 was considered to be experienced enough to do any important job, now we have early teen girls telling the world what it should be doing about the climate change scam!!  Good grief!!!

Anyway, I wish you the best of luck with your career develpment.

[rstofer]

A long time ago (circa '75?), Silicon Valley was in trouble as was the rest of the Bay Area including San Francisco.  One of the first things that came up was the PhDs were unemployable - they were over-qualified.  if you had a PhD, the best you could hope for was being a Taxi driver.  Things were pretty grim for the best and brightest.

You may laugh and joke about your PhD but it's a very high level qualification.  In any event, the .gov changed the law so that PhDs could fail to disclose their higher education and it was all good as long as people didn't overstate it.

Is there any possibility that your advanced degree is putting people off?