My Top 10 Tips for Landing Your Dream Engineering Job

Thinking about pursuing a career as an engineer?  Here are my top 10 tips for navigating the tech waters to land your next big gig.  

(1) Figure out where you want to work and/or what you want to work on.

• Above all, this is probably the most important. Uninspired people produce uninspiring work. Companies want people who love what they do.
• A few questions to ask yourself:

• What motivates me?
• What is my dream job?
• Why?

(2) Research your dream company(ies).

• What is their vision?
• What kind of engineers are they looking for?
• How can you contribute to the company’s technology mission?

(3) Sell yourself by showing, not telling.

• Set up a GitHub account.
• Work on projects that you are passionate about. It shows that you enjoy programming and that it isn’t just a job for you.
• For extra brownie points, become familiar with and/or contribute to the open source projects run by your dream company.

(4) Always write clean code, even on your own pet projects.

• Follow a style guide. Just pick one you like and use it to get in the habit of always coding in the same style; your future company has one and will expect you to follow it.

(5) Create a website to showcase your portfolio.

• If you don’t have much of a portfolio, be creative! Go more in depth on one or two of your favorite projects.

(6) Consistently update your LinkedIn Profile.

• In the Skills Section, include keywords such as languages and tools you are comfortable with to catch the eye of a recruiter.
• Include a photo so you seem friendly.

(7) Craft a one-sentence summary statement that sells your engineering prowess.

• Elaborate with specific examples: good/bad team experiences, great successes or educational failures, leadership, problem solving and bug fixing.
• Use the STAR/SHARE model to clearly frame your answers.

(8) Communicate clearly.

• You may be brilliant, but if you can’t communicate your ideas, who will know?
• Shorter is usually better. What’s the TL;DR version?

(9) Practice, practice, practice.

• Even before you land that technical interview, you should be honing your skills with mock interviews (without a code editor) for when the day comes.
• Practice questions in the language(s) that your target company uses.
• Always keep your computer science fundamentals sharp (algorithms, data structures, etc) since almost every company will ask something related to these.

(10) Never stop learning.

• Subscribe to e-mail newsletters that are interesting to you. As a software engineer and web developer, I subscribe to JavaScript Weekly, HTML5 Weekly, etc.
• Follow influential companies and/or open-source developers on social media.