| Topic Name: |
Search Strategy in Defense Industry |
| Message Name: |
Don't speak in absolutes |
| Date Posted: |
11/07/2004 |
| In Reply To: |
It's almost impossible these days to get a defense related job unless you have at least five or even ten years of defense industry experience, and that experience is highly specialized exactly as stated in the job posting. This is because they don't want to waste time or money waiting for you to get up to speed in the job.
The botttom line is, there are a lot of defense and aerospace workers out there in unemployment land, and the defense companies won't have to wait long to find a candidate with EXACTLY the right quailifications for the job.
I hear what you say about the "black hole". This seems to be a big problem when you apply with any large corporations these days. I think they create these online applications because they have been getting swamped with thousands of applications and they need the computer to scan submissions to weed out bad prospects based on keywords. If you don't have an exact match with all of the keywords in their database, you get dumped and never hear from anyone.
After submitting many applications to these companies, I gave up in frustration and decided to focus on other industries. There's just so much competition and too few positions available. Also, in the event that Mr. Kerry and his fellow Dems take control, you can kiss a lot of defense contracts goodbye and the industry will hit the skids. |
| Message: |
While I agree that the defense industry is whimsical, there are still, as in any job field, opportunities for people who make them.
I say ths after just having finished my first month in the defense industry straight from graduate school; as a matter of fact, my doctorate is in the field of Chemistry.
My suggestion to you is that you not make the mistake of pigeon-holing yourself according to your degree -- others in the government are already doing that for you, and it generally works to your disadvantage. Instead, as with every job application, you should sell yourself as *the* person who can get their job done. If you really convince them that you have the skills and the attitude to get the job done, they won't care if you have a degree from a high-octane hard science university of if you're the poorest hunter in a newly-discovered missing link jungle tribe.
Sell yourself and not your degree. If you use your Ph.D. as a union ticket to a high-class technician's job, you'll be competing in a commodity industry of high-class technicians. If instead can show you used your Ph.D. *experience* to develop the abilities to break through walls in tasks where 99% of your peers would go fetal, then your graduate experience can give you so much more and the degree, in comparison, pales to the rubber stamp that it really is.
I got my job by stopping a recruiter at a conference and telling him that while I didn't have the A, B or C educations he had avertised for (see above comments on pigeonholing -- it is severe in the government), I could do X, Y and was fluent in the multidisciplinary technological issues limiting the field of Z as well, in addtion to managing people and doing it all without supervision or encouragement in a hostile environment and with limited resources. This got him following me for 6 months over 2 continents. My worker-bee-wth-a-stamped-degree act had just gotten me dinged by him that morning.
If you have no direct contacts, make them by going to conferences in areas germane to the military research that interests you. Let 'em know ahead of time you'll be there. Corner anyone who gives talks in those areas, and by all means, corner any recruiters and tell them how you can help them -- in many cases the positions they need to fill are more numerous than the positions they had advertised for.
And knock 'em dead, hero.
|
|
