Feathers44
Member
- Joined
- 12 Aug 2014
- Messages
- 378
Firstly, I haven't been here long enough to know what is approapriate for this board so if I cross any lines then I appologise. Having said that, this is my personal experience of a job application so I feel it should be OK.
A couple of years ago I tried to jump ship from my Avionics engineering career of nearly 25 years (I work in helicopter cockpit integration and airborne navigation system design) to a London Underground Project Engineering role (signalling and communicatons and the like, I believe). The two are not directly analagous, I grant you, but engineering skills are engineering skills and Air or Rail are simply different applications for those skills...or so I thought.
I had a lot of initial interest including a couple of phone calls and an 'no commitments' interview/discussion where I was quizzed a bit then encouraged to carry on with the application by a lot of discussion about how LU needed 'experence from the Defence sector'. Whatever the point of that discussion was, I apparently 'passed' it and was called in for one or two proper 'formal' interviews.
At the end of the day, however, I didn't get a job offer and was told it was because I had 'no rail experience'.
Two years on, I find that I still wonder what was the point of it all was.
It was (and is) clear from my CV that I had/have 0 rail experience and yet it was apparently still worth interviewing me two or three times before telling me that I'd never worked on the railway.
(I persued them a bit for more detailed feedback but never heard anything else)
Is this just two different sets of interviewers with different opinions or was I wasting my time applying in the first place? (Every LU job I've tried for since has died at the application stage).
A couple of years ago I tried to jump ship from my Avionics engineering career of nearly 25 years (I work in helicopter cockpit integration and airborne navigation system design) to a London Underground Project Engineering role (signalling and communicatons and the like, I believe). The two are not directly analagous, I grant you, but engineering skills are engineering skills and Air or Rail are simply different applications for those skills...or so I thought.
I had a lot of initial interest including a couple of phone calls and an 'no commitments' interview/discussion where I was quizzed a bit then encouraged to carry on with the application by a lot of discussion about how LU needed 'experence from the Defence sector'. Whatever the point of that discussion was, I apparently 'passed' it and was called in for one or two proper 'formal' interviews.
At the end of the day, however, I didn't get a job offer and was told it was because I had 'no rail experience'.
Two years on, I find that I still wonder what was the point of it all was.
It was (and is) clear from my CV that I had/have 0 rail experience and yet it was apparently still worth interviewing me two or three times before telling me that I'd never worked on the railway.
(I persued them a bit for more detailed feedback but never heard anything else)
Is this just two different sets of interviewers with different opinions or was I wasting my time applying in the first place? (Every LU job I've tried for since has died at the application stage).