Tips to help mid-level engineers land their next job

Author Tony Malkovic from Engineers Australia

If you’re a mid-career engineer looking for a new job, you might think it’s your CV that will get you the position—but that might not be the case.

Instead, there’s a good chance it might be the networking skills and contacts you’ve built up over your career that will give you the edge over other applicants.

That’s the view of Jennifer O’Donovan, the national manager of the Careers Development unit at Engineers Australia.

“I’ve been in this role for 12 years now and what I tend to find is that the engineers who are first starting off, say graduates or those from overseas or interstate, they’re the ones who need help finding that first job,” she says.

“The rest of the engineers, says with 15 years’ experience or so, tend to get it (a job) through networking.

“So it’s through knowing who’s who in the industry, knowing what’s happening in the industry, who’s tendering for projects, when those projects are coming up ,and if they’ve got the skills to match.

“If I were to put my HR or recruitment hat on, I’d always take someone who was recommended to me, rather than someone who I was reading about off a CV or piece of paper.”

But of course, your CV is a crucial part of your job-hunting toolkit. And O’Donovan says there are several things you can do to beef up your CV.

“The first thing I’d suggest is that you write a functional CV rather than a chronological CV,” she says.

“A functional CV focuses on the skills and attributes that you’ve gained through years of experience, rather than the actual jobs you’ve had.

Transferable

“What I’m finding is that a lot of people are having to change sectors and industries, so it’s the transferable skills you want to focus on.

“So for your CV, it’s not so much ‘I was civil engineer …’. Maybe you could focus on the designs you worked on and how you are a project manager and are able to manage budgets, and work with contractors and people at all levels.

“It’s those sort of skills that people are gaining that employers are more interested in now.”

She says members of engineering teams who have 15 years or so of experience have key skills they don’t always realise they have.

“A skill that these people have picked up which they don’t often don’t think they have is the ability to disseminate technical information into layman’s terms,” says.

“They’re quite used to explaining things to people who aren’t engineers and explaining the technical side of things so clients can actually understand things.”

Keeping yours skills up to date will also help you stand out.

“If all they’ve got is their degree from 15 years ago, that’s great but things can change so much,” she says.

“I think it’s really important for engineers to show how they’ve kept up to date with standards and that sort of thing.”

She says it’s important to customise your CV for each job, and be concise.

“I would suggest for someone with about 15 years experience, you’re probably looking at making it 4-5 pages,” she says.

“If it’s seven or eight pages or more, it can be a bit of a turn-off.

Cover letter

There’s one other thing you should think about.

“With the CV, I think you also need to go back to the old-fashioned cover letter,” O’Donovan says.

“For example, if you’re at an EA technical session and you’re finding out about changes in the industry, and people say they’ve got a project coming up and say ‘You sound like you’ve got the skills, here are the contact details of our HR person …

“You need to name drop in your cover letter along the lines of ‘I was talking to so-and-so at an EA technical session and he mentioned this project was coming up’.

“If you can show you’ve kept up to date with changes in the industry, and then network, that can be a much easier way to get a job than through a recruitment agency and all those processes.

“If you can get your CV to the top of the pile or the top 10 out of 100 applications, having name-dropped or whatever, that’s where you want to be.”

O’Donovan says the Careers Development unit at Engineers Australia has a resume checking service for members.

“We won’t write their resume for them, but we will give them feedback on them,” she says.