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Engineer, Cambridge UK, available

Excuse me if I'm breaching netiquette by looking for employment here, but does anyone know of any vacancies matching my skill set?

Primary skills are designing microcomputers with real-world I/O interfaces. e.g. industrial control systems to consumer hi-fi. So digital with enough analogue for signal conditioning etc.

I have experience of whole product cycles - initial client discussions, project specifications, circuit design, component placement, enclosure design, assembly, testing, quality control to packing and shipping out the door.

I have good appreciation of practical matters - making designs both simple and clever, upgradable, easiest to produce, resistant to EMC, etc.

I can also program simple applications, but time taken is proportional to complexity, spec vagueness, and people who keep changing their minds late in the development cycle.

I'm currently in Cambridge UK, but will move if required, depending on location.

Everyone seems to be finding business hard. I guess due to 9/11 and the megabuckhype.com to titsup.com crash. In 1999 I could get 4 or 5 interviews a week, these days I don't know whether to contact British industry via job agents or a ouija board! :-)

Agents seem to be more of a barrier - you have to persuade them that you're a suitable candidate for a job as well as the employer. The employers don't want to pay big fees to agents when there are so many engineers around.

There are jobs around but they all want _very_ particular skills: e.g. DSP or RF gurus, TCP/IP experts, etc.

Any engineers here finding it hard to get suitable work?

Thanks in advance for your time in reading this,

K.

Reply to
kryten_droid
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What qualifications do you have?

Ian

Reply to
Ian Bell

A B.Sc. in electronics, and M.Sc. in communicating computer systems.

I find electronics a lot more fun though.

Reply to
kryten_droid

"kryten_droid" wrote in news:wXSlb.943$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfep1-gui.server.ntli.net:

This tells me very little about your skills. If it landed on my desk I would have put it to one side and forgotten about it. (I don't have time to sift though your C.V either)

I'm up 20% in the last 18 months , but thats down to me never standing still.

See end of post.

I won't use them any more unless I have to!!!

They seem to be too busy on there own marketing/ image, rather than the product they are providing and I need!

There are more each year as work is outsourced to where labour is cheaper. I wont go down this road myself as I have seen to many companies fail when a sister company to where your work is being outsourced to markets a very similar product to yours, saving the consumer 20%, then increasing it back up when your gone.

What I have started to receive recently and like is:

Correspondence addressed to me (this isn't your general bulk C.V mail out) containing from the bottom up.

CV (Don't let the agencies con you into a professional C.V) size 12 font, organised in any order you like so long as education, work history etc have there own sections in chronological order.

A cover letter including minimum employment term, !outline! past projects. Personally I like to see examples of small, medium, large projects. I don't want nor have the time to read everything you have ever worked on. This will give me a good idea of who you are, if it's looking good I will go to you C.V for more details.

In the last couple of years this has started to appear as the first page.

E.G. (in font size 18)

C, C++, ASM, Delphi ...

8051, Atmel AVR, FPGA ...

High speed ADC, PC104 ...

Firewire, USB ...

EDA tools (PCAD, OrCAD...)

Windows, Linux, Embedded RTOS...

...

Note the lack of sentences. Yes it's an ADVERT for you

Here is an example of how it has worked. I currently have no vacancies and wouldn't normally stop to read though a C.V and cover letter (sorry but that's the way it is).

What stood out was Windows, USB and C. Hmmm. One of our projects was a little behind time, quick read of the cover letter - 1 Month minimum, experienced enough to jump in and get on with it. Scan through the CV for drivers, Yep experience of writing windows drivers.

O.K, there is no real demand but I give him a call to see if he is interested in a months work to write the driver and generally be exploited :)

He's interested because... in work, networking, contacts etc...

Three weeks in, he points out that there is a couple of months work updating a few bits and pieces and taking over another project to free up our DSP guy for an upcoming project.. OK it's a bit cheeky but his face fits and his work is good.

Five months later he leaves to a full time contract at another company.

On two other occasions the people have remained with us, as skills that we weren't interested in at the time enable me to bid and create designs that where outside are normal area at the time.

Reply to
an

----- Original Message ----- From: "an"

True, but as potential employers spend only seconds reading text from potential employees I was trying to be brief.

Good for you. Most companies are not so fortunate.

Yes, one of them has their own hot air balloon. They think it says "we're successful" I think it says "we charge so much we can waste money on status symbols"

I agree this looks unwise. I would not outsource to a company in a country where I could not a. check them out and b. sue them if they screwed up.

Thanks for the tips from the horses mouth so to speak.

Everybody else seems to have their own ideas of what to send. They're the other end of the horse I guess.

I put in all the keywords for CVs sent to agents, because they just stick it in a database and get it to search for keywords.

One agent complained she didn't understand the keywords and asked me to trim them. I doubt she will get results.

My CV also evolved to have keywords packed in a skills summary, when my work record exceeded the audience's attention span.

Reply to
kryten_droid

Agents are part of the problem here in the UK. Direct recruitment has more or less ceased. As the first poster says, they just search through buzzwords in a database. There are lots of unemployed ex-Marconi, Nortel etc.etc. engineers in SE england at the moment and not many jobs. In this climate Agents don't have to be that good to place people. Employers can ask for exact skills matches. You may have used half a dozen processors in your career to date, a potential employer won't care about your ability to learn new stuff - what they want is someone who can be productive from day 1 so they can ask for candidates who have experience of the processor they use. I think its shortsighted, but thats the way it is. A while back I saw an advert for an embedded designer which specified which word-processor they had to have used. Depressing.

Cheers TW

Reply to
Ted Wood

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