New career?
- Thread starter Teccy
- Start date
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wilhelm
nope....
here...
here...
Yep! Been there, done that, don't want any more of those s*****g tee shirts thankyou very much. I've been employed as an 'electronics design' engineer with more companies than I can remember. A couple of them were actually decent employers but they were temporary contracts. Others were mickey mouse outfits where you never knew which pay packet was going to be your last. One was a company of decent size with good pay and conditions but there was a snag. In all the years I worked there just about the only tool I ever picked up was a pen. Redundancy came as a breath of fresh air!
Have I described your predicament yet? Here's some other problems I encountered:
1) It's always easier to get a job if you already have one. Employers are suspicious of the unemployed.
2) It's b****y near impossible to get a job that pays less than the one you've got, no matter how well you could do it. I found myself in this trap when, unknown to me, one of those mickey mouse companies paid me way over the odds. They must have been desperate and of course I wasn't going to argue at the time.
3) Many public sector jobs have gone before they're advertized. The advert is a matter of procedure but they already know who's getting it. If you see a job with a very short closing date it's hardly worth filling in the application form.
Self employed or part of a firm? There was a time when this was a forgone conclusion; holiday pay, sick pay and pension scheme versus tax forms and bad debts. Now it's not so clear cut, especially in a small company. I suppose you either like being your own boss or you don't. Remember that you'll have to do all your own marketing, sales and accounts. In a word, paperwork. You might not have much time left for engineering!
I've had just two permanent jobs that I would recommend to anyone. The first was as a lab technician in a polytechnic; not well paid but a pleasant job with excellent terms of employment. The other is what I do now, fixing accelerators for the NHS; better pay than those mickey mouse companies and, despite what you may have read about the NHS, better working conditions too.
You already have the electronics experience so if you also know how many nucleons make helium you could do worse than look for a job in medical physics. There's supposed to be a shortage of electronics engineers and this has been confirmed by the standard of applicants for jobs here. They apply in their hundreds but very few can analyse a circuit diagram or even explain what inductance is.
The problem of course, as I know perfectly well, is that they DO apply in their hundreds and those few are a few more than you would like to have around. I even formulated the following rule: "It's not enough to be the best candidate. Everybody else must be useless." Just getting onto the short list is a major hurdle. I watched an application from one perfectly well qualified engineer go in the bin because he wrote, and I quote, "I am willing to move to Scotland if necessary." Sorry kidda but this is Geordieland!
Speaking from bitter experience you are in for a long slog of job applications, interviews and rejections but all I can say is stick it out. Persistence will eventually pay off.
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wilhelm
fixing accelerators for the NHS; ??????
tell me....youre having a larfffff.
wilhelm said:
fixing accelerators for the NHS; ??????
tell me....youre having a larfffff.
yay! bring back Matron
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wilhelm
ahh ... yes i know exactly wot u mean......not accelerator cables....but......... the unmentionable condition.
and i f£kkin hope i dont see said machine......
none the less mate ....humour has got to continue. and i dont mean that glibly. death is a part and parcel of life.
and i f£kkin hope i dont see said machine......
none the less mate ....humour has got to continue. and i dont mean that glibly. death is a part and parcel of life.
simon check your e mail
got your passport photo willhelm
My opinion is that generally speaking pen pushers don't make plumbers Unless you are in the 1% that that doesnt apply to I suggest you sack the idea now. I dont mean to be nasty when I say that and while I dont question your technical nous in the slightest, when it comes to getting the last b@@dy screw out of whatever you are taking apart etc basically the practical side of the job that you will struggle too much and you will sack the idea later.
The 1% of pen pushers that do make plumbers / gas engineers is the sort that builds kit cars or strips down old motorbikes, builds their own trailer or is generally good at DIY etc.
Here's an example I know its not a gas job per se but it proves my point.
If you were to do a 3 month go faster training course and I gave you a hammer and chisel and asked you to take an immersion heater out and the job was 20 miles away from anywhere. You would throw em on the floor and drive off and come back 2 hours later with the 'right spanner' and I would have got it out in less than 5 minutes and fitted a new one using a bit of old rag and a chisel wired it up and gone in 25 mins including a cup of coffee and a couple of kit kats.
If you are going to be put off its better to happen now rather than later. I'm telling you this for your own good but if you are determined to overcome stuff like that I wish you the best of luck.
PS Whats with all the daft pics everyone?
Sorry slugbabydotcom but Teccy didn't write that. It was me that wasted five years pushing a pen and I hated every minute of it. I took the job because the alternative was the dole queue then found myself caught by what my sister calls the 'golden handcuffs'. All the jobs I wanted paid less than the one I was stuck in.
You're right in one respect. People who are born to push pens don't make good plumbers - or electronics engineers either. They might have learnt all the theory but they still don't know which end of a soldering iron to pick up.
You're right in one respect. People who are born to push pens don't make good plumbers - or electronics engineers either. They might have learnt all the theory but they still don't know which end of a soldering iron to pick up.
Slugbabydotcom said:
I agree. When a plumber dad and a plumber mum love each other very much, they do a special cuddle...
I disagree with felix that electronics engineers can't be pen pushers though, engineers are, by their very nature, pen pushers. The person with the soldering iron is generally (in lare companies anyway) a technician. OK, so engineers now have trackballs and computers to push as well as pens, but I seldom meet an engineer who has to get dirty to do his job (even my mate who commissions sewage treatment plants). In my experience, engineers do LIKE to get their hands dirty, but 95% of the engineers I know go to work in a suit!
It is an ongoing debate though, what is the definition of an engineer? You will never satisfy everyone, the nearest anyone has come to it is introducing chartered engineers (IIRC Jim is a CENG and I recall in the "burning cable" thread he mentioned he hadn't worked at the wiring end of his business in years
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