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Ask Slashdot: Exploiting 'Engineering And ...' On a Resume?
An anonymous reader writes "In my younger years, I was briefly employed as an Electrical Engineer. Since 9/11 I have been flying combat missions for the military. Since I now have just a little over a year before becoming a civilian again, I was wondering if any Slashdotters had any applicable advice/anecdotes. How does one effectively combine engineering/development with another professional skill-set? (Being a jet pilot in this example.) For those of you who do hiring, what is the best way to sell this type of background?"
Sorry I don't have any advice for you but just wanted to tell you that.
I work at BAE - if you're looking in the Boston area, this could be just the place for you.
We work on stuff for UAVs, planning systems, EW, etc.
If you're interested, get me a resume and I can float it around. We're not doing a lot of hiring right now, but we have a bunch of ex-military folks who are real happy here.
No joke - let me know.
The point of the resume is to show how you are qualified for the job you are applying for. If you apply for several similar jobs, you might submit similar versions of the resume, of course.
Therefore, how you should present X on your resume depends entirely on what job you're seeking. Since you gave no clue what job you're trying to qualify yourself for, there's no way to answer.
For example, if you were applying for a job where they are looking for someone who is obsessive about getting every detail exactly precise 100% of the time, such as "nuclear powerplant _____", your resume would indicate that you operated a $30 million plane precisely, delivering your payload with pinpoint precision, where the consequences of error were literally life and death. You'd point to similar aspects of your engineering work - blah blah 6 nanometers blah.
If you're going for a position where the big deal is leadership and chain of command, tat would be a completely different presentation of your experience.
Nice thing about military experience, especially military aviation is that they, too, love consistency. Follow orders, follow your checklists, get to work on time and get your job done. I would think that an HR drone would just love that sort of experience. They could check off a half dozen boxes right off the bat and maybe get bonus points for hiring a veteran.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Make sure you include "Destructive testing of competitors' products" as part of your skillset.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Except that his current experience will be of even more use.
To the submitter: Consider working as a systems engineer for a defense contractor. Seriously. You have a metric crapload of relevant domain knowledge, along with a EE background. I wouldn't be surprised if you could write your own ticket.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Quick follow up.
Systems engineers in this domain don't really do the "building" or even designing per se. Rather, they are the guys who set the requirements. And people like Boeing, Raytheon, LockMart and the rest all love former military because of the domain knowledge. The EE will allow you to inject a dose of reality into whatever specifications get written.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The only tricky part is finding a job you will like.
I believe there's a rule in the US, wherein if someone likes their job that indicates a management mistake. Whenever my job starts to not suck, management messes with it so it sucks again.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
Grab a friend who knows you well (and who doesn't run you down just for grins.) Have some food, and a couple of beers (or split a bottle of wine) and meanwhile brainstorm and jot down all the possibly applicable experience you can think of. Also, and maybe more important, talk about the things that you are really good at - not just skillswise, but what kind of person you are and what you excell at. And then think of stories that really illustrate each of those.
Have fun. Be silly. No one should try to do this stage of resume writing alone, generally speaking we're all far too trained to discount our skills and put ourself down. Aim for ten pages or so of semi-coherent scrawl. Don't try to edit, editing is easy, and it's for later. Getting enough material down in the first place is what this is about.
And then, a few days later, come back and prune. This isn't time to prune super heavily - what you're looking to create is a superset resume - more than you'd sent out for any one job, but containing most of what you'd send out for anything. Keep in mind that a resume isn't just about skills, it should be about what kind of person you are and what you're like to work with. There are a lot of formats out there, but don't be enslaved to them - while it should be tight and professional, a resume isn't a form application but a creative document that should present you in the best light. (It should go without say that lying is incredibly stupid.) I do strongly recommend looking at it in terms of narrative - whatever you want people to know about you, include a (briefly worded) story that demonstrates it.
Not only does this make resumes more informative, it makes them a heck of a lot less boring. (When I was doing hiring, reading resumes was often tortuous, because they didn't tell me most of the things that were most important, beyond some basic skills lists that weren't that reliable.) Make a resume that represents you well - because you want the manager you absolutely would hate to work for to look at it and say "I don't want this guy" just as much as you want the right folks to recognize you. Truth in advertising is a good thing.
I concur with what a lot of people are saying. I'd look at Boeing if I were you (a friend designs flight simulators for their military aircraft - I suspect you'd do well in that kind of environment). (For that matter, my former father in law - also a Boeing engineer*flew planes for the airforce for many years and eventually ended up at Boeing. I almost managed to get him over to Microsoft when I was there, on Flight Simulator.)
I'd also do what you can in the intervening time to brush up on skills that are going to support the direction you want to go in from here. Start reading up on security. Pick up a new language. Buy yourself a bunch of toys off sparkfun. What people are saying about your skills being out of date is possibly a problem... if they are, in fact, out of date. So make sure they aren't. It sounds like you have a lot going for you, especially with a little polishing and fine tuning.
* Hey, I grew up in Seattle, what can I say?