Stuck

[Otispunkmeyer]

Lost my job just over a week or so ago. In fact someone here posted about it because he worked at the same place (albeit a different site). We were officially put into liquidation a couple of fridays ago.

I am finding job hunting particularly hard. Scouring all the sites and searching for work in the Notts-Derby-Leics triangle has brought up nothing of interest. Or, if it is interesting, I don't have anywhere near the asked for experience & skills. Or, as its a totally different field, have no experience at all. But mostly I am getting results that are completely unrelated to what I searched for. Junk.

I worked as a R&D Engineer for a company doing custom ECUs for running large HGV engines on natural gas. As we were a small company that meant doing a whole lot of stuff; very broad scope of work from requirements and specifications, ECU coding and programming, dyno testing, vehicle testing, literature research, data analysis, making the tea etc.

Very broad, very interesting, but ultimately we were spread pretty thin and really only got shallow experiences of many of these things. To boot, there was no one there from whom you could learn special techniques or best practices. We just had to improvise.

I feel it was actually quite a unique job, but it has left me feeling woefully under-experienced for more typical jobs. Added to this, I just don't think I have the heart for this type of engineering (or any engineering) and am wondering about trying something new. But what? I have no idea.

I am scared my experience so far will have already pigeon-holed me into a specific type of roll but also simultaneously not provided me with suitable experience (on paper) to be considered for rolls that do pop up.

I found I really liked data analysis aspects the most; designing experiments (not necessarily enjoying doing them), then looking at the data, writing my own matlab scripts, excel sheets and formulas to investigate. What kind of jobs offer that, that aren't engineering?

[mr_spock]

MOT tester? Local mapping company? Performance tuning? Aircraft testing? Or even any testing - sounds like you have the logical mentality to do anything like that.

I wish you luck, it's a horrible situation to be in.

[rog007]

I can see plenty of opportunities for you transferable skills. Drop your CV across and let me provide some feedback on that and some role ideas based upon what I see

[Otispunkmeyer]

Sent rog007

Thanks for offering.

[Steve Campbell]

Rog will give you good advice. Consider what you delivered, how you delivered it, and what skills that shows in terms of what you have been doing. It's not all about the specific technology, but how you dealt with problems, adversity, change, challenges, team work, coaching & training others, self learning etc etc.

Good luck

[edc]

Potentially there are opportunities in the Finance sector. Similarly there are data crunching based roles in marketing/market research and IT.

[rog007]

Otispunkmeyer said:

Sent rog007

Thanks for offering.

Hope the feedback adds some value

[fatjon]

I would have thought the experience of embedded code development was transferable to many jobs in fields inside automotive or outside.

[MitchT]

Otispunkmeyer said:

I found I really liked data analysis aspects the most; designing experiments (not necessarily enjoying doing them), then looking at the data, writing my own matlab scripts, excel sheets and formulas to investigate. What kind of jobs offer that, that aren't engineering?

There's a growing demand for data scientists. If you can afford to, take some time out to focus on developing this part of your skill set in ways which are relevant to the tech sector and you'll go a long way to future proofing yourself.