Non-traditional ECE student looking for a job
Hi,
So I am a veteran student who basically worked in IT in the military, I'd say for at least 3 meaningful years, and then for 2 years in corporate hardware labs in the Bay Area. Then I went to school part time and worked full time as a Technical Project Manager at the same company for an additional year, then decided to go to school full time and quit my job.
That was about 4-5 years ago, and now I am looking for a job... honestly any job... The problem I think I am having now is really how to frame my resume. I think I could be a valuable embedded systems engineer, PCB designer, FPGA engineer. While these skills are definitely new college grad level, I don't think my previous experience is entirely worthless either, and I would honestly rather find a profession that makes use of both my degree and previous experience.
Additionally, when I was in my previous roles, I was pretty inexperienced and young, so I didn't really get any metrics on my contributions, I kind of just did what seemed most effective at the time, documented the process for the team, but couldn't say accurately in my resume that I made things "20% more efficient", etc.
The problem is I am not sure how to put all this in a one page resume, and honestly not really sure entirely what career path I can/should take from here since the job market has changed dramatically from when I left my career the first time until now.
I have kind of looked at Systems Engineering as a profession, but I am also concerned that the time I've taken to be a student since my last contact with larger data centers may be a bad look!
I could share my resume, but honestly it's a little all over the place right now and I could use some direction before trying to tailor it to anything.
Thanks for your help Reddit