How are you actually supposed to network / LinkedIn?
I've been having a particularly rough time finding a new job in the field I graduated in. I'm doing pretty much everything most job sites have told me but networking is kinda hard.
I don't currently work in my field so I don't know anyone that would be particularly useful. Everyone I know is already aware of my situation and some of them have even found leads for me but no luck yet.
I have gone to events related to organizations I'm interested in and spoken to people there but it feels super weird to just approach people and tell them I'm looking for a job.
Similarly Linkedin is super foreign to me. This post is literally the most I've ever interacted with a social media site. What do I do once I open that app? Am I supposed to just stalk people on there that might hire me someday? I tried joining a "group" but it's been pending for a week now.
idk what your field is, but IMO (and IME) it's a fantastically good idea to have a blog. I post reviews of books I've read that are relevant or tangentially relevant, things I learned recently, some tutorials, strong opinions that I have, etc.
Your blog accomplishes a few things:
I have a degree in environmental science.
I actually have considered a blog just for maintaining some of the skills I learned in school, I'm just not sure how to start. Are there sites that host blogs or should I just host it myself?
Loads of sites host blogs, or you could build your own which would be a tech tick in a box.
Alternatively you could use one of the fediverse blogging tools - although I don’t know how robust they are.
From a LinkedIn perspective, I’ve found my last few roles there and it does appear to be the default place that most roles are advertised now (again, for tech) so start searching for roles rather than trying to build out a network first?
One piece of advise I would offer to someone starting out in a career is to or be too fussy. Find a job, any job, as closely related as possible to where you want to be, and go for it. I dunno why, but it always feels easier to get a job when you’ve already got one!
Also don’t expect to hear from lots of them. And expect to be kicked back by more. Keep applying. Keep going hard and you’ll get there.
Finally, and maybe I’m old here, but put in a specific cover letter with every app. When I’m recruiting that’s a huge plus for me.
I used to add cover letters for every application but after a while of nothing it just stopped feeling worth my time. Now I'm just kinda shotgunning applications and seeing what sticks. If it's a particularly interesting position I'll be sure to write one though.
Sounds like our situations are very different. I'm looking for government work for the most part but of course I'll take what I can get. It's just gotta be able to pay my mortgage.
I don’t know how other industries are and I don’t have a ton of experience hiring via LinkedIn but of the hundreds of applications I’ve received through it I haven’t gotten a single cover letter.
Today the easy way to make a blog is to use a static site generator like
https://jamstack.org/generators/hugo/
Hugo is crazy fast, you can keep your content in Git and set up build scripts that will built it on Azure or AWS and stuff the files into object storage, point your CDN at it and pow!
Myself I am looking at getting into blogging again, I have way too much to write about for the fedi, and I am looking for a Python-based SSG because I know I can bend something written in Python to my will and make something that is good for technical publishing.
If in the Houston area, my company is looking for an EHS specialist. I graduated with a mechanical engineering degree from UH and it took over a year to get picked up in their engineer rotation program. That being said, on the off-chance this caveat applies to you and you're cool with it, PM me and I'll link you the job site to at least look at.
If not, best of luck, and I feel your pain!
Having a personal blog seems so...15 years ago. Is it really still relevant in 2023?
If you're in a field where you can have a portfolio, that might be a good alternative. For example, software developers and GitHub.
Personally, I'm a software developer that doesn't code a whole lot in my free time, so I maintain a blog instead.
What exactly do you blog about?
I often see software engineers blog about varying problems they ran into in their jobs but that always feels weird to me. I don't think I'd be comfortable blogging about my day job tasks even if I could anonamyze it.
I mostly write about technical subjects (usually programming and Linux), and sometimes about my other hobbies.
I avoid writing about work. I like to maintain a strong degree of separation between my work life and personal life. Also, although the problems I solve at work are very interesting to me, I don't feel they'd make for very interesting reading material.
Hi, thanks for sharing, this is rather an interesting perspective.
I'm not familiar with blogging at all, what's mainstream platform for blogging right now? How does it compare to building your own personal website?
Hm, I think if you want an easy-to-use platform, the best right now is probably Substack. Medium has gotten pretty enshittified over time, and I see a lot of people posting regularly on Substack.
Another option would be Wordpress, if you go with the option where they host for you and you pay them. Don't host WP yourself, it's a nightmare.
If you want to go the self-hosted route, I use Hugo and I love it, although I've also heard great things about Gatsby. Gatsby supports MDX whereas Hugo doesn't, so I think I might go for that if I were setting up from day 1 now, but if you're pretty nontechnical and don't care about such things, Hugo is fine.
Alright, I'm going to start from the assumption that you are a total newbie to LinkedIn / social presence in general. Apologies in advance if I say something that seems self-evident or overly basic, just trying to cover all the bases.
First - when you create your profile - having a picture and a headline is important if you want to do any networking on LinkedIn. The photo doesn't need to be a professional photo, just a decent picture of your face, not in any compromising positions (so no racy shirts/hats/beer in hand, etc). Your headline can be basic - and just say something "Environmental Scientist" to start or whatever type of job you want. It's important to build your headline and profile as the job you want, not what you are doing now.
Skip over your about/Summary section for right now, and build out jobs / education / certifications. Depending, you can just put job titles and not put any achievements or anything in there. I've seen people be successful both ways. if you go with putting more content, make it actionable - Start with a verb - "Won, Achieve, Kicked-off" or whatever you did, and talk about your impact. So the structure is <Verb> <thing you did> <impact you had>. Try to keep in mind that your resume / linked in is a marketing document - you are marketing yourself and you want to show your best.
That's the straight-forward part. After that you need to start sleuthing a bit. If you have a small network, see who they follow/are connected to, and see what they post about. If you see someone who has a lot of connections or posts a lot, you can start with a 'follow' (you see their public posts) if you feel weird about the out of the blue "hey wanna connect!"
If you go the "Hey wanna connect" route - be up front. Say you are just out of school, on the job hunt and trying to expand your network to grow. Most folks will accept the connection and the people who don't, meh you aren't missing much.
Now more sleuthing. LinkedIn search is going to be your best friend. Start by searching for job titles you want and look for people who have your job title. Look at their profiles and see the terms they use, what their headlines looks like, their About section, etc. You need to see how people in your broader industry talk to each other - what terms the use, how they reference things, what hashtags they used. This is your key being able to reach the right people. keep track of common words phrases, and don't be afraid to look through their activity lists and see who they are interacting with. Your goal here is to track down the most active people on LinkedIn who do the job you want or work in your industry.
Try to connect with people who seem like they are active or are especially interesting. Like they work in the company you want, they have the job title you want, etc. When you reach out to them, again say "Hey I'm fresh out of school and job hunting, growing my network. I see that you work at <x Company>. Would you be open to talk with me about your career journey there." or "I see that you are an <X role>. Would you be open to talk with me about how you got your first role?" Again, most people will connect and you might only get a few messages back and forth, but every little bit helps here.
Now that you've been looking at people's posts, and profiles, paying attention to their "About" Section, go back and write your about section using the commonalities you saw from the profiles you were reviewing. Your goal here is to include the words that recruiters and hiring managers are going to search for when they are hiring for the job you want.
As you are doing this, you'll see lots of posts from people about things you are knowledgeable about -- you'll be using LinkedIn search to help you find things to comment on. Don't spam, LinkedIn doesn't like that, but high quality comments on a couple posts a week will do a ton to boost your visibility.
It's a lot and it takes constant effort, but it's worth it. Getting just a little bit of visibility on LinkedIn goes a long way, and its totally possible to build your network without being creepy or spammy.
Hope this helps
Oh my god thank you! I've been looking for a step-by-step guide like this but they usually assume I've been neck deep in social media since MySpace. This gives me a ground up checklist I can use until I understand the platform a bit better.
Glad its useful :-)
"it feels super weird to just approach people and tell them I'm looking for a job."
In my opinion this is an incredibly common misconception about networking, and completely misses the point of it.
The point of networking is to learn. When you're on LinkedIn, you can filter by people who went to your school and work at the company you want to work at. Then, connect with them and say you also studied X at Y and want to pivot to work in field Z but it's unfamiliar to you, and you were hoping to ask them some questions.
Most people will get back to you since people are generally nice and want to help. Then, just ask them questions. You haven't worked in this field, so you should have several. Ask them what their day-to-day is like, what technology they use, what they learned outside of school that was helpful, why they chose their current subspecialty, etc. And then ask if there's anyone else they'd recommend you speak with. And repeat this.
Slowly, you'll learn more and become competent in the field despite not having work experience, and come up with more nuanced questions. And, eventually, through dumb luck, you'll run into someone that happens to be hiring or knows someone who is, and you'll get a referral.
Getting a job is already the implicit goal in networking so asking someone directly while networking is pointless. Most people can't get you a job. And those who can, in whatever capacity, will already offer it to you if they discern you're a good fit while speaking with them. No one is gonna say "Damn this person seems perfect to hire, but they never asked me for a referral so I guess I can't bring it up."
Is that normal etiquette on LinkedIn? I can just find someone that is in the field and just start talking to them? What happens after?
I had a random person reach out to me for this exact reason. She was looking to get into the field I'm in, was in the same city as me, and asked if I'd be willing to just chat and share my experience. Honestly it's kind of flattering, I'm no big shot but I do have a good deal of experience, so yea, go ahead and ask!
Yeah, it's pretty common. That said, stay professional. "I'm looking to get more insight about this field. How did you get started? Are there any certifications or programs I should take?"
It's completely fine to do that. What you should ask is for a video call, like Zoom or Teams. Or even better, if they work in the same city as you, find a cafe near their office and ask if they would be willing to grab a coffee during lunch one day.
One way I have had some
Success is I ask, “I’d like to learn about how you got where you are.”
LinkedIn is generally for connections you've made while working. You meet colleagues, network with them and as you all change jobs you can offer each other opportunities.
As a fresh grad, usually you'd want some internship connections to fallback on. Otherwise.. yea that's a tough one. Probably have to slog it out and just keep applying until you can land a job, cold.
If you get to any interviews, you could at least try to add the people interviewing you to LinkedIn. That way even if you end up not fitting the role they may keep you in mind for other roles that come up.
Add the people in the interviews? Is that a common practice? Should I ask them in the interview or just add them after?
The few places I have interviewed seem to want to avoid contact after the rejection. I get nice personalized emails inviting me to an interview and then a canned response after the interview.
Before the interview is when that happens, if it happens. Some people are happy to do it, some are weirded out by it.
You can do a more subtle way of this. There’s an option that lets you hide your identity when you look at other people’s profiles. Turn that off. When you look at a person’s profile they’ll get a notification that you looked at it. They’ll be able to see it was you and even look at your profile. The setting is on by default.
It’s a creepy feature, but great when you’re trying to network on LinkedIn. Turn it off if you’re going to stalk profiles of people all secret like.
Isn't that only for the paid profiles? I don't believe I've ever seen a report or notification that someone has looked at my profile.
Paid let’s you see who visits your profile while remaining anonymous.
If you turn on anonymous browsing, then LinkedIn won’t let you see profiles of people who visited your profile. Basically it’ll match your level of privacy settings to what what you get to see.
Sorry, just to clarify, you say I should turn off the setting that hides me and then look at people's profiles?
In this scenario you want them to know you looked. It’s probably more useful to be able to see who actually looks at your profile so you can get an idea if people are actually looking into you.
I honestly wouldn’t put too much weight into LinkedIn though. I’ve never had an interviewer comment “you have the best LinkedIn I’ve ever seen.” They probably glance at it for a few seconds at most, if at all.
How would you suggest I go about this then? It's been a real long time with very little to show for it. I thought LinkedIn might be the missing Lin- er... Ingredient. I can't afford an internship and most won't take me at this point anyway. All I seem to be able to do is just learn more potentially useful skills and shotgun applications into the void.
Depends on your industry. If you’re in web dev or design I can help, otherwise you need somebody in the same field of you to advise.
Building your LinkedIn presence takes time, especially if you're a fresh grad, and I'm not sure it's the most effective networking tool. I've had a lot more success going to Meetups in areas related to my profession, with the added bonus of possibly making friends.
I went through a phase of intensively using LinkedIn and I met a huge number of people there but particularly I met people who wasted my time in a big way, I partnered with a business development guy who just couldn’t sell anything and worse he drove away the small dollar clients I had chasing big dollar client. Then I met another hustler who had a potentially great business idea and had brought in some of the best subject matter experts in our field, he was a master of pretending to listen to them without really listening to them and wasted a lot of time going in circles.
With all the spam I was getting plus those disappointments I deleted my LinkedIn account.
LinkedIn has been valuable for me, but not necessarily in the way that one might think. I’m not getting job offers from friends or people that I used to work with. I’m getting interest from recruiters that are on there that are reaching out to me about opportunities they are looking to fill.
I have two different suggestions for networking:
Don’t interact with posts that are getting negative attention. There are lots of political posts and that kind of nonsense on there. Potential employers don’t need to know your political preferences and whatnot.
All in all, networking is not a quick and easy fix. It takes time to build a strong network, and having one doesn’t guarantee you are going to get job offers. You might have to apply for jobs the old fashioned way while you build up your network and go from there. It took me probably 6-8 months before LinkedIn started generating any interest from recruiters for me.
So that's a normal and expected thing to do on LinkedIn? Just cold adding people?
Yeah, absolutely. Especially if it’s someone in the same industry as you are. I used to work for a company that had some divisions in various other countries, and I added people from there that I never even met. I still haven’t met them in person, but I’ve had conversations with some of them over LinkedIn. I’m in construction and I’ve added project managers and such from other companies.
The worst case scenario is that they ignore the invite, or decline it, and then you just move on. Not a big deal. I have about 800 followers on LinkedIn at the moment, and I’d say probably 500-600 of those are people that I actually know. I would comfortably say that at least 200 are people that either I added, or that added me, and we have never met. I have still sent at least one message to every single person on my network though.
You never know where an opportunity could come from!
I have gotten some my best jobs through linkedin, but I will make a few disclaimers first:
I am in software. I don't know if your field has the same recruiter saturation on linkedin or if the methods around recruiting/hiring are similar.
I have a lot of experience to fill out on my linkedin profile, so that undoubtedly makes some of this advice easier.
Therefore, this whole long thing might be entirely worthless to you. I hope that's not true, but I'm posting anyway because some other lurker is certain to make use of it.
With the disclaimers out of the way, and apologies if this isn't fully applicable, here is how I use linkedin to find jobs.
I see advice, here and otherwise on the web, to reach out to individuals and try to "network" that way. I have not done this. It seems like it would work if you get lucky and make contact with the right person, so my opinion on that would be that it's probably an OK use of what would otherwise be downtime. I used to do some marketing-adjacent work, and cold outreach in general is usually measured such that single digit response rates are considered success. Most cold outreach gets ignored or shut down.
So I think yes, do try to make connections with people in the field who might become your bosses or teammates and start the kinds of conversations that others in the thread have suggested, but maybe don't make it your main activity, just because it can feel deflating to craft a bunch of well thought out messages and get few or no responses. I would think that on days when you plan to focus on career stuff, plan to spend some time doing other activities, and then some time also doing individual cold outreach.
I will say that I have had people randomly reach out to me a couple times asking questions about the field. I don't find it unwelcome or weird, and think I was able to offer at least a nonzero amount of helpful advice (ok maybe a little weird, but that's more of an "I'm nobody special" kind of imposter syndrome thing than anything else LOL). I also never directly helped anybody get hired, as unfortunately I was never at a place where they were looking for anything less than experienced devs at the time. That's a whole nother conversation and issue we have in tech, that is out of scope here.
Be active on the platform
OK so what do we definitely want to to? My number one thing I do when I am looking to interview, is be active on the platform. Like many social sites, there is an algorithm that linkedin uses to try and get everybody the most bang for their buck. I have repeatedly found that just visiting the website or clicking on mobile notifications to open the app, and clicking around on things, increases the amount of times I show up in searches and the amount of messages I receive.
It makes sense. Some professional is searching for XYZ (for me, that might be software developer): linkedin tracks and knows who is active. It is to everybody's benefit that the searcher more often sees people who are a decent match and also have been online reading and responding to messages, reading peoples content, searching for jobs; rather than somebody else who might look like a better match for the search, but swipes away or does not receive app notifications, rarely logs in, and has unread messages in their inbox.
So click around daily, behave interested. Answer every message. Click on the things that say how many people searched for you, even though they don't show you any useful information as a free user, stuff like that.
I like to change unimportant small details in the about section of my profile, so the profile itself seems "fresh," current, and active. I cannot know for sure if or to what extent this influences the algorithm, but it's such a small effort to do something like update "X years experience" to "X years professional experience" every few days, that I just do the activity.
Optimize profile for keywords
Put keywords in your profile at every opportunity. When I say keywords, I mean the words you expect someone to enter into a search box where you would want to be a result in their search.
For me, I am imagining a recruiter typing "software developer," "senior software engineer," at a high level. Then go deeper: there are a bunch of technologies, programming languages, database types, etc that they will also search for. There's tons of stuff that a person might type into that box. Whatever they type, I want those words to be present on my profile!
Keyword research
Keywords are great, and this is one of those pieces of advice that seems obvious once you have heard it.
It works better with more keywords. How to find keywords? Look at job postings.
Even as someone experienced in my field, I see new trends all the time in what kind of language people use. As an example, almost everything I have ever worked on has someplace where it is important and challenging to take bad data and make a best effort to turn it into good data. This has probably always been true, and will probably always continue to be true. What has changed over the years though, is how people describe that activity. I constantly see new phrases and acronyms pop up as people strive to express "deshittifying data" in the smartest way they can. The same thing seems to happen for "understand how to use a database."
Back on topic, the reason this is important is because we want that jargon on our profile so we match better for searches.
I don't know what that jargon is for your field, and maybe you do or don't, but there is probably a wealth of keywords that you have not considered or have taken for granted, that surface as you look at job postings with specific intent to identify and extract them. The people who are hiring now will give you the language they use, by using this same language themselves in their job postings!
It will be challenging as a new grad without experience to list, but try to get creative! You can say you studied [keyword], are interested in [keyword], volunteered at a place where [keyword] happens, etc.
Which leads nicely into the next section...
Bigger is better
In the USA where I am at least, the general advice for resume writing is to keep it short. Nobody is going to read it that thoroughly, the advice goes, and you could almost be considered to be disrespectfully wasting peoples' time if your resume is longer than one page early on or two pages once very experienced.
Indeed, my experiences have generally been that I have been repeatedly flabbergasted by the impression that an interviewer is seeing my resume for the first time during the interview itself. So for the resume, that is probably good advice, and I follow it myself.
This is not true on linkedin.
Load that profile up with anything you can! Each item is an opportunity to add more of those keywords.
It is still true that most people aren't going to read all of it. The difference here is, you aren't asking them to read it. If you send somebody a ten page resume, the understanding is that you're sending someone something with the expectation that they will be reading it (even though they probably won't LOL).
This is a social profile, the decision to actually read it is for the reader to make. All you are doing is giving them the option... and gaming the shit out of the algorithm to your own advantage to the best of your ability.
Your linkedin profile is not going to get you a job by itself. What your linkedin profile is going to do is get you conversations and interviews. That only happens when you show up in searches. Add to it, inflate it, get the words in there so that you show up in as many searches as possible.
Also, don't be shy about kind of inflating things to make them seem more important than they maybe really are. Nobody is background checking your linkedin profile. I am not saying to lie. Don't put jobs you didn't have or schools you did not attend... but do figure out how to list the name of, for example, a school you visited and took a single class or attended a talk. More. Bigger. Better.
I didn't actually attend college or university, so I don't know if that's a great example or how much something like that is useful in your field or how people search, but it can't hurt to have more opportunities to show up when people search.
An example that I can speak to from experience, is I have a professor friend who teaches programming and database stuff. He invited me to a hackathon he was bringing a dozen or so students to, so I went. It was fun.
The reality there, the story I told my people at home when they wondered what I was doing that day, is that I hung out with my buddy, met some cool 20-something year old kids and talked shop, and drank free red bulls for 24 hours.
On paper, that can easily become: volunteered at XYZ hackathon at ABC location, mentored [programming language] and [programming language] students with [popular cloud technology] who built an app using [well known API] from [well known company]" something something [type of database].
Now those keywords that showed up once or twice show up a few more times. The search engine loves this, and will deliver more eyeballs to your profile when people search. You probably see a pattern here by now.
Who am I targeting?
Who is supposed to be reading all this stuff and doing these searches?
Short answer: recruiters.
I treat linkedin mostly as pull, rather than push. There is an entire industry revolving around finding candidates and matching them to people with the power to make a hire. These people spend their entire workday searching for more people to have conversations with, and are under high pressure to keep candidate pipelines full.
Recruiters want you to interview with hiring managers. It's their whole thing, their paycheck depends on them moving candidates into and through these candidate pipelines.
This is why I target them rather than potential bosses or teammates. Yes, potential bosses or teammates might be able to short circuit some of the hiring process, but these people are busy doing their own thing, and not likely to be very interested in chatting with an unknown person very often.
Recruiters are also busy doing their own thing of course, but their thing is chatting with new unknown people and getting to know them just enough to find a reason to get them into conversations with the hiring officials!
Action steps
OK, optimizing the profile might be able to be done pretty quickly. It's beneficial to review and make at least small updates from time to time as mentioned above, but once the profile is looking good and loaded up with keywords, should we just sit on it and hope people find it?
Believe it or not, after a few years you will probably be getting messages from recruiters almost daily, and find them more of an annoyance than anything else. This is obviously unlikely on day one LOL
Now it's good to do a little pushing, and some searching of your own.
This is where my knowledge starts to break down, because honestly, it's almost too easy in tech. You will have to adapt to your industry accordingly.
In tech, we literally have people who call themselves "technical recruiters." So I can search linkedin for "technical recruiter" and get seemingly infinite results. I don't know if your field or other fields have an equivalent of that [my industry] recruiter title that people use.
There are a few other creative titles that I see people use often and I can search for:
Again, there is a supply and demand thing with software people where it kind of seems like they are kissing our ass a bit by calling us "talent." In other industries, this might not be a thing at all.
I would say look at companies in your industry, filter on people that work for those companies, and see what kinds of titles people have. Search for those titles, and connect with those people. It might even be that HR people also are responsible for bringing in new candidates instead of dedicated recruiters; I even see a little of that in tech at smaller and medium sized companies, and see people with dual linkedin titles like recruiter/HR.
HR is another department that loves to use cute titles these days. "People ops," "Director of employee happiness." All kinds of stuff. Look at the people in these positions in your industry and work the trends.
Anyway, find these people, connect with them, send them messages. Tell them your story. All you want out of them is an interview. Interviewing well is its own art, but it doesn't matter until you are getting interviews.
At the risk of repeating myself, these people actually want to hear from you. Tell them whatever it is, I'm young, I'm hungry, I'm changing careers, whatever your story is. Even the ones that can't help you today, the good ones have a memory like a steel trap (more likely they have a good organization system) and you will have some of them messaging you six months, a year, two years from now.
Pay attention to their feedback and refine your story accordingly until it starts getting you to the interview stage.
Ask them directly for feedback. Do you think I would be a good fit? If not, why not? Let them help you surface blind spots in your story.
Bonus
A lot of recruiters befriend other recruiters on linkedin, click around and see their connections, then connect with them too.
Having more connections that are recruiters will help you with the algorithm. Linkedin generally tends to surface 1st and 2nd degree connections above everybody else. If you are connected to more recruiters, that's more opportunities for other recruiters to find you when they search for your keywords in the future.
Final pro tip, since linkedin search can suck sometimes
You can use google advanced operators to find people's profiles and get different results than the linkedin search.
Put into the google search bar
site:linkedin.com/in recruiter [keyword] [keyword]with some different keywords you have surfaced. Thelinkedin.com/inurl is how peoples individual profiles start, so that's pretty nice. If you start getting too many international profiles, you can explicitly make itwww.linkedin.com/in, which I think is only the US site.Be aware that sometimes google will give you a message like "we are seeing a lot of unusual traffic from you" when you do a lot of (sometimes even just a few) searches with the advanced operators, so it's best to do one or two, then go back to linkedin and do your other activities, and come back to google for more fancy searches after some time has passed.
I think that's all I got. Good luck!
This is great stuff! I've been on LinkedIn for a while, but I'm still a novice at working the system. Thanks for putting this together!
Haha, I've thought about it a lot. Almost composed a reply like this a few times on that other site, but if you're not quick over there nobody will see the post, so the timing was never right.
Looking for places outside of just LinkedIn May also help. Asking to join slack communities or places on discord where conversations are happening and people can get to know you better as a person.
Where would I go to find a community relevant to me? Are there databases of servers where I can search by topic, location, now hiring, etc. ?
I don’t know about your state but in New York we have an official job listings web site and New York also has centers that will try to help you find work. Today I have a smart RSS reader called YOShInOn that classifies and workflows content, I used a predecessor of that when my too-early A.I. startup collapsed, got a job for another A.I. startup in two weeks, got let go there, they had a data collection system called “themis” that I disagreed with the architecture of, so my classifier became “nemesis”, it took a little longer to get a job after that. Had my job search continued much longer I would have given myself a job cleaning out the spam and scam job listings from that site!
I used to be really cynical about job fairs but when my son decided he was serious about getting a job off the farm (for a while he was doing random handyman work as part of crews organized by a friend but not getting enough hours) he went to a job fair and had a job in a week.
I had nothing handy like that. I had to go through google, Reddit and many places to see what channels people recommended. Two of the slack groups I’m in have websites where you submit to join and then they let you in manually. I would assume many industries have similar growing communities online.
Given your degree are you trying for government, university, or similar public positions or are you looking for any role that would fit?
I ask because the approach for government and universities would be drastically different than a non profit or for profit private industry.
I'm focusing on government work because I'm already a government employee and would like to keep my benefits but I'm not super picky. Given my degree that's where the majority of the jobs are anyway.
You may want to be open to broader engineering jobs. For instance, any entry level mechanical or (unlicensed) civil engineering job in a public energy or utility could also be considered “environmental”. Check any mines, water treatment/recycling, or manufacturing plants that have an impact on the environment for engineering postings. Treat this like you have an engineering degree with a slight bias toward environmental considerations, instead of an environmental degree. Once you have a job and paycheck then you can network and change jobs as often as needed to get where you truly want to work
I had thought about going back to school (third time's the charm?) for environmental engineering. You really think anyone would hire me without one? I'll give it a try I guess.
Oh, i mistook your environmental science degree for environmental engineering, but it still probably applies. Some entry level engineering - type jobs might consider environmental science. For instance, i worked for a solar company doing CAD designs for a while. Some of the other CAD designers were architect majors and various others that i wouldn't be surprised if we had a couple enviro science majors mixed it.
Yeah I've been learning programming languages and other software in an attempt to snag those type of positions.
I think there's a lot to be said for talking to people irl as well! Go to some meetups (there are often industry-specific ones online), or work out how to get (free/cheap) admissions to trade fairs. People are often surprisingly willing to help new graduates/junior employees (especially with some gentle and not excessive flattery) so cold emails can be successful.
You can also ask people for advice rather than straight up for a job (they're then more likely to reply because it's lower stakes for them and people like to think that they – and usually do – have valuable advice to impart on others).
I'm in a similar position to you! I've recently decided to quit my job soon due to a variety of reasons but mostly just that I am really looking for a fresh environment and type of work, so I realized that in the years I've worked at my job I've been really stuck in my own bubble...
Luckily, just before I decided to quit at my job we had a "LinkedIn expert" come and help us for getting clients and such, and at first it did seem quite foreign to me, but her advice has been quite eye-opening to me because it's definitely changed my perspective on how it works, mostly in the sense that interacting with posts can lead to conversations with people, and also how it's not quite just the stiff-professional-only-job-talk kinda place, but that people tend to talk about a lot of things.
I will say though, I think it did take me a while to really appreciate it, cause when I was starting to use it it felt like my feed was so dry and full of posts like "use this for your productivity!" or "(insert an infographic here about how consistency is key)" and it was just... boring. But recently that I've been connecting with some people and getting some interesting content it's not too bad. I've even recently been messaging with some people which is absolutely out of my comfort zone.
Basically, I think it's worth a go. I still don't think I really have the "networking" down, but I'm getting there slowly but surely and have had some interesting conversations with people who I definitely wouldn't have contacted if not for LinkedIn!