How To Land A Job After Engineering?

Most of the students dream of a job after engineering. Are you one of those? If you have chosen to have the corporate experience and you’re now looking for a job, I can help you with my tips on how to land a job after engineering.

Who am I? Well, I did engineering in Information Technology just like millions of other students in India. I sat for campus placements, and after a few attempts, I was able to bag five job offers  – Tech Mahindra, Cognizant, Wipro, Infogain and MphasiS.

I ended up not accepting these offers and did a job for a startup SEO agency where I worked as a social media marketer and content creator for about one and half year. Now, I work as the sole marketing and operations head for a Delhi-based fashion brand – Brijraj and also indulge myself in blogging and YouTubing.

My experience with landing a job was quite intense for I didn’t have a magical success at it. I didn’t land a job in my first attempt. I was rejected by two companies, and it would have had happened even more times if I had not learnt my lessons. Now that I have learnt those lessons, I want to share them with you in hopes of you getting something beneficial out of it.

Things to remember to land a job after engineering

1. Confidence is everything

The biggest role in my success was played by my confidence. For the first two interviews, I was once over confident and then under confident. But what you need is just the right amount of confidence. It should be enough to make you sound like a charismatic individual that would be an asset to the company of the interviewer. It should be moderate enough not to make you ignore what job role you’re interviewing for and not follow the instructions of the people conducting the interview. Believe it or not! It all depends on them. So, you better treat them as gods.

2. Be prepared

I will be a fool and liar if I say I didn’t prepare for the interview.

Step I: Good hold on language

I had good conversational skills and hold on the English language. Even though no one who knows me believes it but I studied in a Punjab School Education Board school, and most of my classmates can’t speak English as fluently as I can and don’t have a vocabulary as good as mine. However, I was aware of the shortcoming back then and hence; I decided to change myself. I taught myself to read, write, speak and listen to English properly.

Also, remember that being able to understand and express in the English isn’t everything in the interview. If that had been true, there would be no joblessness in U.S.A and all that fuss around immigrants. The way you speak – your confidence while speaking matters more than how exactly you talk.

Step II: Technical knowledge

At this time, you need to understand that being able to talk well doesn’t always get you the job. I did land my first job in Infogain primarily by this blog you’re reading and my skill to present myself as a talented and intelligent individual. However, for all other jobs, I needed technical knowledge.

To land a job after engineering, you have to be thorough with the core subjects from your field. As I was from IT, my core subjects included Operating Systems, System Programming, Databases and a couple of things like that. As you may see, I am not a person who can recall things very easily. By the time, I was in my fourth year; I had no idea about the names of the subject I had read. Expecting me to recall what I read in them was asking for the impossible.

However, I needed that, and I decided to work on that. Two months before the interview, I picked up all the relevant topics from these subjects and prepared for them just like I would prepare for my exam. The focus at this step has to be in being able to explain the concepts. Remember that it’s not an exam paper where nobody will cross question. Be ready for that and practice it.

My next two jobs were pretty much because of my preparation at this step. There’s no other way but to do the hard work while trying to land a corporate job. Nobody will give you a job of a tester if you don’t even know the basics of testing.

Step III: Aptitude

The third and last step was to prepare for aptitude. Most of the MNCs have aptitude tests to screen the students. The people who fail this test don’t even get a chance to appear for the interviews. I prepared for this the most as I was horrible at mathematics. The logical reasoning was a cakewalk but quantitative aptitude had me spend some sleepless nights.

That’s how you prepare for the interview to land a job after engineering. Give it your best shot. And then do it again and again until you land the job you want.

3. There’s no shortcut

It has been about two years since I wrote the post on why you won’t get a job after B.Tech. Since then, people message me about how they’re not good at this, and still, they want to have a job. Come on! If you’re not good at it, work on it.

And don’t think it’s coming from a person who doesn’t know how not being good at something means. I couldn’t speak or even read English. The time when the privileged children I met later in my life were reading classic novels, I couldn’t even read a few words. I have been the person who couldn’t speak English. I decided to work on it and fix it. It’s all in your head. If you don’t want to do it, you don’t. But if you want to, you can.

I am also a person who nearly failed in my first year at college. I couldn’t understand a thing they taught, and the books were as if they were written in Greek. It was my luck and some extra efforts in the examination hall that got me through. In the second year – the fourth semester, I topped my department with 87% marks. I never went below 80% starting from semester 3rd. Do you think it happened by chance? I worked for it and made it happen.

I was kicked out of my second interview because of my inability to answer technical questions. It took me a week to go through the entire syllabus that I had already studied again for interviews and then walk into my interview for Tech Mahindra as if I know everything. I did. The interviewer was hell bent on finding a subject that I didn’t know, but I had had enough of the humiliation of being rejected in interviews, so I didn’t leave a chance.

Nothing happened by luck. I worked for it. I used to work for it more than anybody would imagine. I answered interview questions in my dreams and until and unless you have done that, don’t walk around telling people you can’t get a job because of this and this thing.

4. Don’t get disheartened by rejections

I remember myself crying like a stupid person in front of hundreds of students because I couldn’t land a job I had wanted. That was the most humiliating moment for me in my entire life. Add to it the fact that somehow everybody thought that those few jobs I couldn’t get were a cakewalk for me. What the fact remains is that they got the jobs and I didn’t. For a few days, I did feel horrible.

But I finally realised feeling awful doesn’t land me a job. Preparing for a job, fixing my shortcomings and doing great in the interview will. So, that’s what I did.

For me, it was just a few interviews I missed, but in your case, they may be a few more. Remember that every rejection means there’s some flaw in your preparation. You just need to fix that flaw, and then you can land whatever job you want. Take it like that and work for it.

Nothing in your life comes for free. Nothing comes easy for real people. You just have to learn to work hard enough to make it seem easy to the others who see you from a distance and watch you getting successful. They will never know the struggle, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a struggle.

There will be one, and you have to fight like a warrior in that battle. Get that job after engineering. It’s meant for you!