Question
I am a 26 year old Computer Engineering graduate. I have applied to around 30-40 companies and all my job applications were rejected. I am hopeless and so fed up with my life. My CGPA is 3.5 out of 4.0. What shall I do?
Answer
Are you doing the basic no-brainer things that don't require permission?
Conventional wisdom is wrong. Job-hunting as a full-time job is so draining, you won't last long enough to get a job in this economy. You have to be prepared for a long wait, which means making your life meaningful while you search, and avoid making it a full-blow waiting period.
The rule of thumb says you need 1 month searching for every 10k in income you hope to make. In this economy, unless you have one of the hot skills, it is more like 2 months/10 k. So that means a year for a 60k job.
I am pretty sure you don't want to waste a whole year of your life with nothing to show for it except rejection emails. This will all be over someday. Do you want to look back and say, "I wasted that year?" or "that unemployed year was bad, but I did that one great little project!"
- Participating in technical Q&A at Stack Overflow
- Contributing to a couple of open-source communities
- Maintaining your own website with little projects demonstrating your own coding skills (even if they are not in the Web tech area, I am sure you could make some useful little tool in whatever type of coding you do, that others could download and use)
- Freelancing on a couple of projects from places like rentacoder or odesk, even if the money isn't worth it, just to keep your working skills/tools sharp.
- Picking up some strategic high-value current skill like Ruby, via items 1-4
Conventional wisdom is wrong. Job-hunting as a full-time job is so draining, you won't last long enough to get a job in this economy. You have to be prepared for a long wait, which means making your life meaningful while you search, and avoid making it a full-blow waiting period.
The rule of thumb says you need 1 month searching for every 10k in income you hope to make. In this economy, unless you have one of the hot skills, it is more like 2 months/10 k. So that means a year for a 60k job.
I am pretty sure you don't want to waste a whole year of your life with nothing to show for it except rejection emails. This will all be over someday. Do you want to look back and say, "I wasted that year?" or "that unemployed year was bad, but I did that one great little project!"