It’s difficult start thinking about life after college, but now is the time to start your job search. I’m sure your classmates are already knee deep in the process, so it’s time for you to do it too. Here are 6 resources to help you to find your first full-time engineering job. These resources are also available for recent graduates who are still looking for work.
Career Center
The college career center is probably one of the most underutilized job searching tools for college students even though it’s probably one of the most helpful places to help you out with your job search. They offer plenty of free job search help including resume review, interview practice, and job posting boards. Many career center also host on-campus interviews where employers come to campus and interview students for entry-level engineering positions. I have gotten job offers from these campus interviews and so did a lot of my college friends. Another cool tool that most career centers have is an online job board where employers post jobs and only students and recent alumni have access to, which limits the amount of competitions you have for those particular jobs. Make sure you take full advantage of this resource.
Career Fairs
It’s easy to dismiss this as a waste of time, but let me tell you this: I got my first internship and first job out of grad school from the recruiters at these career fairs. Most schools have multiple career fairs, including a general one and an engineering specific one. I recommend going to any career fairs (even the general one) if there are engineering companies there to get yourself maximum exposure. If you are a recent graduate and is still looking for a job, I don’t think it’s an issue with you showing up at your alma mater career fairs and look for jobs so you should definitely take advantage of this event also. In future posts I will provide more tips of how to be effective at the career fairs.
Networking
If you ask a veteran recruiter, he or she will tell you that networking is probably the most effective way of landing a job. As a college student, this means that you need to get to know your college friends, especially your engineering classmates, really well. Attending parties is a good way of connect with people, but you should also join engineering clubs and honor societies such as ASCE, SWE, Tau Beta Pi, and Chi Epsilon. The meetings at these organizations are excellent places for you to meet friends and potential future co-workers. If you are a recent grad, make sure you keep in touch with your college friends and they might be able to hook you up for a job with their current employer.
Job Search Engine Sites
There are some very helpful general public job search sites out there. Two of my favorites are Indeed and Simplyhired. They are simple to use and you can just type in the location of the job and what you want to do and the search engine will spit out tons of job leads. On Indeed you can even post your resume for the public to see. If you want to find public jobs, a great place to do so is GovernmentJobs. This website has plenty of postings for civil and structural engineering positions from public agencies and cities.
Online Submission to Specific Companies
This is probably not the most effective method, but I have heard of people getting jobs this way before. If you have companies that you would like to work for, go ahead and search their website and look for the career section. I have done this before and seen cases where there’s a relevant job for me listed on these company websites but somehow was not picked up by the job search engines. Make sure you fill out an online application for these jobs on these company websites and hopefully you will get an interview call. Even if the job you want is not listed, it doesn’t hurt to submit your resume to these company websites anyway to get your name out there.
This is a great tool to connect with people in industry. Make sure to connect on LinkedIn with your classmates but don’t be shy to send requests to other people in the industry. LinkedIn is a a professional networking website, so people are not as sensitive to connecting with you as they are on Facebook. This website is increasingly becoming an important tool for recruiters, and I know of companies that use LinkedIn as their main recruiting tool. If you have a good LinkedIn profile, you might even get unsolicited emails from recruiters offering you a chance to interview at their companies. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn to help expand your own professional social network!
In future posts I will go more in-depth of how to take advantage of each of the tools above. Do you know of other resources of where an entry level engineer should look into to land his or her first job? If so, add to the comment section below.