Resume questions 7

[root9]

Hey guys, I have decided to leave my first "engineering" position I got after graduating this spring (BSME). I'm a little confused about how I should describe my current job since I've only been there for ~9 weeks and haven't gotten around to doing anything that fits in the "engineering" part of my job description. The key elements of my job description for my current employment are

-Supervision of on-site construction, repair, and modification jobs
-Overseeing performance against schedule and estimates
-Developing work schedules for the execution of each job
-Estimating necessary time, labor and materials for each job
-Managing inventory of available scaffolding in the warehouse

I'm also supposed to be in charge of setting up scaffolding. Some of the towers being built are huge, irregular, built around objects, and in tight spaces. As such, they require a bit of planning before just pinning pieces together.

However, this company is making me do loads of purely menial manual labor to apparently get a feel for how these jobs work. In the past nine weeks I've spent a good five of them on site doing glorious things like 12 hour shifts of stuffing insulation in bags and carrying buckets of demolished chunks of refractory out of boilers. Around the warehouse I've counted boxes of fasteners to get an inventory. As far as estimates go, I've looked at maybe 2 or 3 drawings just to get square footages of a few walls that needed insulation. The hours they have me work are not possible for me in regards to driving safely (read: falling asleep and wrapping my car around a tree or whatever) so this job is a bust regardless of the work.

I'm 100% sure I'd eventually do more things from the job description. Here's a screengrab of my resume with my current employment at the top of the experience list but with no descriptors

Obviously I can't put "dumped small buckets of stuff into bigger buckets for disposal" and "filled bags with stuff for disposal" on there. On the other hand, putting items from the job description on there wouldn't be all that truthful because I never got to the point of doing them, right?

How should I go about describing my current job on my resume?

Of course, any other pointers on my resume would be much appreciated. Thanks for reading

 

[oldestguy]

" But I'm not going to look poorly at an engineer who doesn't want to (literally) go pound sand."

I once had a graduate engineer with a masters' as an assistant in a consulting civil engineering firm, who's dad owned a construction company. Can you imagine him not knowing what a back-hoe is, as example of what I had to put up with? He had never been exposed to the grunt jobs out there. It turned out that his relationships with contractors, as part of his job, were pretty crazy, to say the least. When I semi-retired and became my own "boss" as a consultant, those same contractors were mighty good clients for me. They had enough of the past problems with company's "new" engineers learning at their expense.

 

[ornerynorsk]

Dan, I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but perhaps I should have included a definition of the word paraphrase in my post of 11 Aug 15 13:46 so as not to confuse anyone. I don't think we need to pick nits, and realistically, the OP's description of what he is being expected to do is getting very close to the line of what an educated person should not have to deal with, agreeing in principal with you on that one. We've all worked with prima donna's and we've all worked with people who are willing to take too much abuse. Everyone has to draw their own line and decide when enough is enough.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

 

[jpankask]

I would not waste the space on your resume listing your coursework. Any engineer is going to know basically what your courseworks was for mechanical engineering, and it will all be specifically listed on your transcript that will have to be submitted to your company. And really, unless you took some highly specialized course that pertains specifically to the job you are applying to, nobody really cares. All engineers took physics, calculus, diff eq. All mechanical engineers took thermodynamics and design classes. You might list a specialization, such as heat transfer or machine design, if you had such at your university, but use that space on your resume to sell yourself, list accomplishments, unusual facts, etc..

Regarding quitting so soon on your first job...if you can make it to the second job reasonably soon and you stay there for several years, it won't be such a black mark. However, if you leave this job after 10 weeks, then leave your second job after 5 months...probably not going to get a third one any time soon. Don't shy away from some manual labor, but I would definitely push back on the late notifications for significant travel, etc. Working 12 hours days (for some defined time period) is not a reason to quit a job, but unrealistic expectations for travel and starting times are justified. It's not too unusual for a highly sought-after engineer to have extremely short notice to get to a site to consult with someone in an emergency type situation, but as a new engineer, I doubt that's what is going on. If you stay on for a while, the next time your boss calls you Sunday night to be somewhere at 6 AM Monday, as politely as you can I would tell him that is not a reasonable request and you would be happy to leave at 6 AM, to arrive at 11 (or whatever is appropriate for the situation). You can also tell him that if he would give you more notice next time, you can make travel arrangements. When your interviewer asks you why you are leaving your current position (and they will after that short period), that story will give you a credible reason (just remember to keep your story factual and without emotion).

 

[oldestguy]

For what it is worth, here is what I did at one of my jobs (I stayed there 19 years). Earl on the boss apparently was impressed with how I could help the company and asked me a lot of questions, since I had a specialty he did not have. However, he was a work-a-holic and his awake hours were all spent working. I would get calls at all hours at home. Many question could wait until the next day, but he was a rather impatient type. I finally decided enuff. When I was home I never answered the phone and left that up to wife and kids. The instructions were always that I was not home, but they took a message. I'd wait about 2 or 3 hours and call back. After a while I never received any more of those calls. He was a great friend and this subject never came up later. Our friendship lasted right up to his death at his age of 96.

 

[spieng89]

I resigned from my first job out of college within 90 days and haven't needed to look back. The key is to have a clear/concise reasoning as to why you are quitting and what your goals are moving forward. I knew the job I was in would not help toward my future goals, and I did not want to waste another minute there if it would not help me in the long term.

It's important to be loyal to a company, but exponentially more important to be loyal to your own dreams and aspirations. What good is an employee if they are not happy?

From reading the opening post, my advice to you is to find another place of employment once you have a clear goal in mind.

 

[RyreInc]

I would just like to point out that, while there is lots of good advice here, (almost) none of it is what the OP is asking for: advice on his resume.

 

[root9]

I know but after reading some of these responses I don't even mind

 

[KENAT]

RyreInc thread731-392701 from the OP was probably fresh in the mind of many posters and there was perhaps some cross over.

If you're so concerned about this why not offer some resume advice yourself?

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​

 

[MintJulep]

As for the resume,

Nine weeks isn't anything, and as you note, the job has provided no relevant experience.

Just leave it off.

You are a fresh grad, looking for first job.

Be more descriptive about the plastic medical thing.

 

[jmaglott]

Spell and capitalize a software's name according to the software company's spelling. For example: MATLAB not Matlab, AutoCAD not Autocad.

 

[zappedagain]

That's a good lesson there; check your references. Have a friend call them and act as a HR manager.

I once did some part-time design work for a small firm. I had to leave them quickly but didn't believe I left them in a bad situation. About 18 months later I was interviewing with a company that was very interested in my experience with them and asked to use them as a reference. I hadn't planned to use them as a reference, but I gave them the phone number and waited in the lobby; the next thing I knew the hiring manager came out the door with this really scared look on his face and I was told the interview was over and escorted out the door; I expect the conversation was something like "hire him and we'll sue your pants off for IP!". Lesson learned on that one.

Your 4 line summary of what the job was supposed to be looks great for a resume. Sadly, if you didn't do any of that this might be all you can pull from that experience:

"12 hour shifts of stuffing insulation in bags" - material handling
"counted boxes of fasteners to get an inventory" - inventory management
"looked at maybe 2 or 3 drawings" - -Estimating materials for each job

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