How did you GET your job(s)?

[Alexander McGee]

I got my first "real" job working for Stryker Instruments. Recently, I requested to be transfered to our sister division, Stryker Medical. Most notably, the company is committed to 20% growth each year, and we have for over 20 years. Add that up for a minute...

My University helps students find jobs quite a bit, but regards Stryker as one of their "top 5" hardest employers to get into. They have a series of 5 steps to the application process, including a Gallup interview, 20 staff interviews, as well as beating down the HR Recruiter's defenses by impressing them.

My dad has always said that "It doesn't mater what you know, it's about who you know" and this is certainly true for a lot of people, and a lot of employers. I read somewhere that a good 60% of the jobs out there are taken by people who "know someone" in the company, and that makes sense.

However, when you get right down to it, you can't fake a Gallup interview, and you either know how to do your job well, or you don't. I think a great resume has a lot to do with it, and a lot of people can't seem to get this right at my school. I have had over 30 job offers at various employers, but I have, and continue to turn them down because I want to work for Stryker.

My school is an exception form the norm though, because everyone has a job somewhere (co-op school, visit http://www.kettering.edu), but I made my resume a long time ago and the school didn't help me much, though they offered to a lot. The problem people have is that they don't update their resume a lot, and you have a list of things that you did over a span of 10 years or so. I like to keep the most recent information on there, at the top.

More to the point, I pursued the job I have now because I love the company and their products. I have posted online at monster.com and all of those, and the school sends me jobs that I might like occasionally, and a lot more when i was a freshman. Again, unique situation, but still.

When you come down to it, a healthy balance of what you know, and how you present yourself is most important. However, who you know never hurts either.

[Lee]

Campus interview with Duke Power (Duke Energy) recruiter at Southern Technical Institute (now Southern Polytech) in Marietta, GA. Recruiter was looking for mechanical engineers but I scheduled an interview anyway (electrical). He took my resume and another recruiter called a week later. I was offered a job the next month and have been at Duke Energy for 25 years. Most important thing is good resume and how you interviewed, not what or who you know.

[KathieK]

I went through a directory of libraries in Connecticut and sent my resume to each one. After several months I was interviewed and offered a position in the library system at United Technologies where I stayed for 25 years. I found my most recent position online. As a side note, I had posted my resume online and a headhunter actually called me and offered some suggestions for improving it. I thought that was great!

And my current employer googled me before my interview. Be careful what you post online in blogs, etc. It could haunt you in a job interview.

[KenWittlief]

Originally Posted by KathieK

...And my current employer googled me before my interview. Be careful what you post online in blogs, etc. It could haunt you in a job interview.

Interesting. How would they know that anything they find online was you, or someone else with the same name?

If I google my name lots of stuff comes up for other Ken Wittlief's

[Mark Pierce]

I've had a whole variety of experiences getting jobs in the last 25 + years.

Part time programmer at Michigan Tech - referral from friend.
Summer Internship at Univac - co-op/internship fair at MTU
Honeywell (first full time engineering job) - MTU Career Center
Lear Siegler/Smith Industries Aerospace - Headhunter
Capital Electronics/Capital Technologies - cold phone call / resume
Oliver Machinery - continuation of work done through Capital Electronics.
Castle Technology (Self employed) - all of my customers were referrals from people I knew.
Diesel Technology/Bosch - answered newspaper ad
Gentex - Answered newspaper ad

Learning many things at each of these positions has enabled me to keep growing as a person and an engineer. While many respondents have mentioned long careers at one employer, the nature of their responsibilities and skills needed has undoubtedly changed dramatically over the years.

Three of these companies had rejected me within a year of hiring me, so making a good impression, remaining positive and being patient is important. Sometimes the timing has to be right for an employer to match your skills with their needs.

[BRosser314]

Although I am only in my senior year i have a job at Delphi Automotive, Dont laugh. Getting jobs at large companies are inportant, reluctant for me i am not sure if i will have a college co-op thru Delphi. Although knowing the right people also is a great benefit. Being part of a Michigan team allows to be in a close knit community of many companies competting. Talk to your mentor and engineers on if they think they have any openings in there plants or factories. If they dont they might have friends that are Vice President of a Large company across state( for my case).

[Jeremy Roberts]

Shortly before graduating from Georgia Tech in '03 I began attending every campus job fair and sending out my resume through MonsterTrak. I ended up getting a few interviews through both these avenues however this is not how I ended up getting my first engineering job out of college. In addition to taking these conventional routes I contacted the members of the Peachtree Regional committee and board and several other FIRST engineers I was working with or had worked with in the past. The recommendations that I received allowed me several final interview opportunities without having to go through the entire process.

The offer that I accepted came as a result of a fellow regional board member recommending me to the former CEO of Mapics who sits on the board of directors of the company that I now work for (Qcept Technologies). They invited me for an interview which lasted about 3 hours including lunch. A few days later I received an offer. I found out about a year later that they had decided that they wanted me not long after the interview ended, but I guess they wanted to make me sweat .

So is it who you know, what you know, or who knows what you know? In my opinion it's all three. Who you know and who knows what you know gets you in the door and what you know keeps you there.

[Richard Wallace]

I can't resist the urge to jump in here, because the previous two posters are from my alma mater, good old gatech.edu

Directly or indirectly, Georgia Tech got me every job I have held since 1977, starting as a ChE co-op at Olin Chemicals in Charleston, TN. After that I changed majors to EE, and got another co-op job at Hughes Aircraft in Fullerton, CA. After graduation I interviewed with a half-dozen companies that were recruiting at the Georgia Tech placement center, and took the offer from TRW Defense Systems, a Hughes competitor. A year later I was back on campus at Tech, recruited as a teaching and research assistant by one of my professors. That professsor (Dr. William E. Sayle, who subsequently served a long term as undergraduate director for ECE) introduced me to several of his colleagues in the power electronics research community. One of those (Dr. Richard Hoft) was instrumental in hiring me as a junior faculty member at the University of Missouri, after I completed the Ph.D. at Tech. That was 15 years ago.

Now I work for Emerson. I got this job because Emerson was sponsoring my research program and contacted me to ask if I was interested in joining a new business that they were creating in my technical area, which is electric machines and drives.

JVN told me recently that "it's not who you know or what you know, it's who knows what you know that gets you hired."

JVN is right.

[Jeff Pahl]

Well, I got out of college at a bad time ('91) for engineers. My future wife graduated a couple weeks before me (different school), went home to Atlanta, and had a job 3 days later. I lost, and the country boy from Wisconsin moved to Atlanta. I then found out that getting an engineering job in Atlanta without having gone to Georgia Tech (nothing against Tech) in a tough economy was going to be really tough. Spent 28 months doing temp work, everything from warehouse work to office work to electronics assembler and technician. I also started taking night classes at Southern Polytechnic in Marietta just to keep my brain working. We had about given up, and were going to move somewhere else when our lease was up. At a office party for my wife's company, I started talking to the husband of one of her co-workers. He mentioned he was an engineer, and said to get him a resume. I did, and about 2 months later got a call. It had ended up on the desk of the only engineer at the company that had attended the same college (Rose-Hulman) that I had. That alone made him curious enough to have me come in for an interview. Turned out we had had the same adviser for our senior projects. Anyway, two more rounds of interviews later, I had a job, and have been there building spaceflight hardware for 13 years now.

Who I knew (and networking outside of the normal "engineer network circles") got me the interview. What I knew, and how well I interviewed got me the job. What I have learned since then has kept me the job, etc. At the time I knew almost nothing about RF testing, and absolutely nothing about working in the space business, but they were willing to take a chance, mostly based on the school's reputation and my interview.

It's been a great ride, and I have been lucky to work on a lot of great projects, including Cassini, a couple of Mars missions, and a lot of stuff that's now orbiting Earth, both research and communications. However, I do have to say that working with FIRST is the most rewarding thing I do, and I'm thrilled that the company is becoming more and more supportive of FIRST each year.

-Jeff Pahl
Project Engineer
Test Development Group
Defense and Space Systems Division
EMS Technologies, Inc.
http://www.emsdss.com/

[Matt Leese]

In many ways suprising to myself, I've never gotten a job through FIRST (although it almost got me an interview one time; Delphi never got around to calling me back after they said they wanted to interview me). My current job at Boeing Space & Intelligence Systems (I start full time on December 9) I got through the career fair.

About two years ago, when I was looking for a coop, I went to the Boeing booth towards the end of the career fair and talked to one of the recruiters. I gave my little spiel about my invovlement in FIRST and I was asked why I wanted to work for Boeing. My answer was simple: I always wanted to be an astronaut, never really got over it, and now I wanted to work on space craft. Apparently, despite the fact that the poster Boeing brings has a picture of the Space Shuttle on it, very few people know Boeing makes space craft. About six months later, at 9 PM, I got a phone call asking if I wanted to do a 7 month coop in Seal Beach, CA. After some thought (they only gave me two days), I accepted and dutifully traveled west. At the end of my coop, I was offered a full time position which I accepted.

I'm currently sitting in Long Beach, CA waiting to start work on December 9. I never realized everything that has to be done to move (even if you get lots of it taken care of by your company!).

Matt

[Greg Perkins]

I'm going do delve into my current job (which hopefully will be my job for many years to come); my job came to me, actually I came to it...which came to me...if that makes any sense. I was on a "field trip" to this engineering firm in Manchester that (apparently from what I was told in class) make measurement systems...big deal, I figured I would go, and get credit for participation. We toured the facilities and we were informed about how keeping your product inexpensive will create better competition in the market, with yours ultimately being cheapest and selling the most of. Wow, still thinking to myself "big deal", until at the end of the tour John (my boss) said "we are looking to hire one of you to work here part-time while still in school doing CAD using the Inventor software" all of a sudden lights turned on and I was extremely intrigued. I rushed home from the office, immediately typed up my resume and sent it in within an hour from the end of the tour.
Sadly, I was giving up hope. After not hearing a word about the job for almost two weeks, I had assumed they had already made their choice, and I was not chosen. This all changed one day when I strolled into my lecture hall and expected to be given another lecture on the forces that are created with chain/sprockets; was I ever wrong, John was there and he was giving us materials for a class project we were going to jointly work on. After his lecture, he called out four names, luckily, I was one of those four names. He was setting up interviews and I readily eager to get mine out of the way, was the first to be interviewed.
The interview went phenomenal, I dressed up professionally, had a leather bound portfolio, an expensive pen set, multiple copies of my resume, and some samples of my Inventor work. I was not nervous at all, pitched my pitch without hesitation, and all in the back of my head was still hoping someone did not pitch a better one than me.
Two days later.......I got the call, not the dreadful one, but the best phone call I have received to date, John said that they were comfortable with my previous training in school with CAD and that training would be unnecessary.

So all in all, I got the job I wanted, doing ridiculously cool stuff and having the best co-workers in the world (a nice paycheck is nice too ).

Click here for more information about my company.

[Jay TenBrink]

While at Michigan State University I was in SAE. During my senior year in 1982-83 I was the student chapter president. Chrysler held a recruiting dinner for all of the officers of the engineering organizations on campus. I interviewed on campus and also at Chrysler Engineering in Highland Park, MI. No job offers followed.

For the next 6 months I sent out over 60 resume’s and had many interviews on campus with no offers. On a whim, I contacted the Chrysler recruiter I had dealt with 6 months earlier. From that follow-up contact came 3 interviews and 3 job offers. I have been with Chrysler/DaimlerChrysler ever since. Over the past 22 years I have held a number of different positions in design, development, manufacturing, operations, and engineering management. It’s been pretty good.

What does this mean?
1) My MSU experience in SAE was very similar to FIRST: organize, raise funds, design, build, test, compete, promote, network, and manage our time. I would not have gotten my job without it.
2) Don’t give up. Hard work and persistence goes a long way, even if you do have good contacts.

Jay

[Heuerproduction]

Nice to see you young folks working!
Experience is what you need to land a perfect career when you graduate from college. To answer the original posters question, it's who you know, and what you know. I started my career basically on my own, with three teenagers, I needed to make a fast career decision. Art runs in my blood, so this is where I began putting my career together.
But what I do confuses most people, they expect to see canvases of my work displayed in an open arena. I've seen to many artists hang on for years without getting noticed, so i did it a better way. I found a way of printing my work on popular products in order to recieve the appreciation I deserve. Instaead of waiting years for it. Plus I work for myself, I don't have a boss looking over me.
I wish you success in your career finding adventures, but may I make a suggestion? do what you love or you'll regret it.

[Madison]

I was referred to someone here at the office by 488's lead mentor after my, uh, dedication to finishing our robot last year made me lose the crappy, interim job I'd taken over the holidays. It was in every way a blessing. I've moved around a bit in the company since, all as a result of making a good impression on the people I meet and work with here. Even when I was among many hundreds of people laid off last fall, my supervisors and their directors were looking out for me and found me another position in the company.

Developing process for new products is interesting and I've had to learn a lot about the different parts of our company and how they function (or don't function, as it were) which only makes me more valuable as a rare resource that knows what both the left and right hands are doing -- sometimes even at the same time.

[Freak999]

We got to pick what jobs we wanted and if there was too many on one particular team they got dispersed among the other teams. If you were particularly skilled in one area you got to stay. As a 3 yr veteran I know were my spot is.