Career advice for engineers

While working as an employee, you should also be on the look out for industry trends. One of the easiest ways is to go to your LinkedIn account, add details to your profile and check "open for offers". LinkedIn will send you job offers matching your profile. These offers will give you an idea of what skills are in demand. You can use this information to guide your hobby/side projects. Even if you are happy at your current job, apply to other jobs because it will force you to pay more attention to your CV and your skill development. Try to expand your professional network by attending networking events and get as much job interviews as you can so that you can assess what you are really worth. You will feel in control and be prepared for any emergency that might cause you to change your career. And who knows, may be there is a better alternative than your current dream job.

Aligning audience expectations

Today I attended a workshop and noticed that my expectations and the presenter's goals were not the same which caused me to question the flow of the presentation. I gave the following feedback:

• What problem are you solving, what are the alternatives, what is unique about your solution?
• Tell the audience what to expect, what they will get at the end of the presentation, e.g. "to get familiar with Yocto concepts and workflow, to build a minimal Linux image".
• More importantly, tell what NOT to expect, e.g. "we will not build a full Linux distribution from scratch because it will take more than one day"
• What is expected of the audience, e.g. you should know how to install Linux packages.