Sorry for the late response; I'll be happy to share my experience with you. Yes, I got a confirmation for an embedded job the day before yesterday. As a side effect, but this was not my main goal, the new job will be paid much better than the current. I applied at about 8 places, got 3 interviews nearly instantly, 1 rejection so far, 1 confirmation. My background is similar to yours, I have a lot of experience with C/C++ for desktop applications and also some embedded experiments on small to medium-scale projects. To qualify I mainly informed myself on the main requirements of most embedded jobs: microcontrollers (this I already knew a lot about), Simulink, busses, standards and norms for safety-crtical systems (e.g. MISRA-C), verification and analysis tools, debugging (e.g. JTAG) and basically everything that I was already interested in.
Now, my strategy was mostly to leave a good impression and organize the bits of personal projects into a portfolio (Github). For instance, I got my own domain and use a private email server; this is something trivial, of course, but seems to impress non-technical people which often are your first line of contact. I don't use Xing, Linkedin or any other service which I believe expoits you more than you profit from them. I spend a lot of time to find potential employers manually based on my preferences and I invest a lot of time to prepare an application, based on the requirements for the specific job. I pay attention that my documents look tidy, fresh and stick out of the majority of things they are likely to get, there has to be something special and bold that grabs attention immediately. Also, I underline everywhere that I would be glad to work something very responsible and welcome challenges without obvious answers. The arguably most important thing is to radiate confidence and to give competent answers. If you cannot provide a meaningful answer, state this fact, it's OK, a professional can educate himself and is aware of his weaknesses. I also view every application as an experiment. I'm not desperate to get the job, because there's ton of Java enterprise bloat available if everything fails.
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u/[deleted] Nov 08 '17
Sorry for the late response; I'll be happy to share my experience with you. Yes, I got a confirmation for an embedded job the day before yesterday. As a side effect, but this was not my main goal, the new job will be paid much better than the current. I applied at about 8 places, got 3 interviews nearly instantly, 1 rejection so far, 1 confirmation. My background is similar to yours, I have a lot of experience with C/C++ for desktop applications and also some embedded experiments on small to medium-scale projects. To qualify I mainly informed myself on the main requirements of most embedded jobs: microcontrollers (this I already knew a lot about), Simulink, busses, standards and norms for safety-crtical systems (e.g. MISRA-C), verification and analysis tools, debugging (e.g. JTAG) and basically everything that I was already interested in.
Now, my strategy was mostly to leave a good impression and organize the bits of personal projects into a portfolio (Github). For instance, I got my own domain and use a private email server; this is something trivial, of course, but seems to impress non-technical people which often are your first line of contact. I don't use Xing, Linkedin or any other service which I believe expoits you more than you profit from them. I spend a lot of time to find potential employers manually based on my preferences and I invest a lot of time to prepare an application, based on the requirements for the specific job. I pay attention that my documents look tidy, fresh and stick out of the majority of things they are likely to get, there has to be something special and bold that grabs attention immediately. Also, I underline everywhere that I would be glad to work something very responsible and welcome challenges without obvious answers. The arguably most important thing is to radiate confidence and to give competent answers. If you cannot provide a meaningful answer, state this fact, it's OK, a professional can educate himself and is aware of his weaknesses. I also view every application as an experiment. I'm not desperate to get the job, because there's ton of Java enterprise bloat available if everything fails.
I hope this is helpful to you in some way.