I would like to share some advice, based on my own personal experience, for new engineering graduates starting out on their professional careers.

When I left university, I was not at all well prepared for the transition. Despite gaining a masters degree from one of the top universities in the country, I found it found it very difficult to find work initially.

Initially I applied to a number of graduate schemes at larger companies, but quickly became discouraged. Although I was always able to progress to the later stages of the screening process, I struggled in the lengthy interviews at the recruitment days. Particularly the competency based interviews, where it is very difficult to give meaningful answers unless you already have experience working at one these companies.

Overall, I believe that applying to the larger graduate schemes is the wrong strategy to take, especially those who struggle under intense competition. By their very nature, these schemes are all highly competitive. On average in 2014 there were 40 applicants for each job. With more and more people entering higher education, competition will only increase.

Therefore I have the following advice:

Seek out and apply to smaller companies

Smaller companies haven’t got massive marketing budgets so you will need to work harder to find these jobs. However, many will advertise jobs through the local university careers service.

Working at a small company is also a great way to get a broad range of experience early on in your career. You will likely be involved in the whole life-cycle of a project, from design and implementation to testing, delivery and maintenance.

Self promotion

Self promotion isn’t a skill that comes naturally to many, myself included. Being able to promote your abilities and potential is essential though.

To really stand out from the crowd, just having a good CV and linkedin profile isn’t good enough. Creating a personal site and blog and attracting a large enough audience is a great way to showcase your work and interests.

Contribute to the open source community

I believe that all developers should support the open source movement in some way. Since many organisations contribute to and benefit from the open source community, this a good way to meet industry contacts.

There are several ways to contribute to open source projects:

  • Raising issues for new features are bugs.
  • Fixing existing bugs.
  • Improving the user and/or API documentation.
  • Answer questions relating to open-source libraries and tools in Stack Overflow

Additionally, you could create a useful project of your own, or a plugin for an existing project, and publish this as a package on a site such PyPI or RubyGems.

And finally: It’s always a good idea to keep recruiters on your side by avoiding rants like this.