Engineering Talent Expert Mike Gourley shares a hot take:
Prepare questions for your interview like the job description doesn’t exist.
Changing jobs is a huge decision for you — for just in life in general, for your family. And I hate hearing that you wound up in an opportunity that you regret.
So a good example would be a power electronics engineer that I’ve recently worked with and placed at a client of mine.
We ultimately support a lot of the tier one and tier two suppliers that are out here in Metro Detroit.
So this person had reached out to me.
He had joined an OEM six to seven months prior to our conversation and realized at that point that while he assumed, based on the job description, that he’d be working in design and development of those power electronics, after six or seven months, he realized that it was nowhere in the near future at all.
It just wasn’t going to be possible for him to do that kind of work that he was really looking to do to build his career in the way that he wanted to.
Don’t let assumptions based on the job description get in your way.
It’s asking the right questions. It’s understanding when you’re interviewing that the more concrete, specific questions you ask, the better your chances are of making the right career move for you.
It’s your time to learn and take that opportunity to ask about where are you in the program.
Are you in DV or PV stages of this process for this product?
Ask about the team structure. Ask about how many other engineers are you working with locally.
Oftentimes, a good question to ask on the supplier or OEM side is where is this development and design work actually done.
You might be surprised.
Again, just if you’re only basing it off the job description, you might be misled. The managers are never going to hold that information back from you when you ask a direct question.
So learn about it. Ask about it.
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