Experience matters a lot when it comes to recruiting the right people for an embedded engineering job. Experience enables engineers to adapt to change when there is a new development in any programming software, new electronics components, or changing to another processor family or manufacturers based on project specifications.

According to Trevo Brieninger on the 5 Important Factors to Consider When Making a Hiring Decision which includes Experience, Potentials, Hard Skills, Soft Skills and Cultural Fit. The most important is Experience and that’s why I’ve decided to write on this topic. If you’re reading my article for the first time, I suggest you also read my previous article on 7 ways to become a Full Stack Embedded Software Engineer as it will inspire you to make some few decisions on how to build up your career in embedded systems.

I will be giving little tips on how to gain experience as an embedded software engineer and also how to recruit embedded engineers if you are a recruiter.

For Embedded Software Engineers:

1. Learn and Build Everyday: If you’re thinking of becoming an experienced embedded engineer (moving from Junior to Senior level) then you need to really learn and improve on yourself on daily basis, get addicted to it, read and practice with books that teaches the fundamentals. If you’re interested in ARM Cortex-M series, I would recommend you to read The Definitive Guide to ARM® Cortex®-M3 and Cortex®-M4 Processors book by Joseph Yiu.

Embedded systems is what I’ve been doing on daily basis for about 10 years now, I’ve worked on over 300 advanced embedded engineering projects for both final year students and organisations, and those challenging times has built my experience over the years, it allows me to know the right and best approach to take when given a task. Don’t learn as an hobbyist but instead learn it as a profession and don’t depend on other people's code but you can learn from it because your experience and capacity determines your opportunities.

2. Voluteering: You cannot be useful and be ignored, voluteering helps to make you better as an individual and also adds to your experience profile as it helps you to make new and fulfiling connections.

For Embedded Software Recruiters:

1. Give Test with Delivery time: One of the things that inspired me to write about this article was because of a post written by Ehab Khairy which I shared on my LinkedIn page.

I’m part of the Talent Acquisition team at ByteHub Embedded and one of the major thing that i’m always interested in when interviewing applicants is their experience, I always challenge them to show me the best code they’ve written before, I take time to go through their programs to know their coding capacity which I believe it’s the way to know the best people who are right for the job. Hire People and not Resumes.

If you have any question, you can connect with me on my LinkedIn page and I will be glad to help.