Strategies for Unemployed Software Engineers: Unlocking Opportunities for Career Growth and Success

Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

At this point, it’s common knowledge within the tech community that the current job market is challenging, marked by widespread layoffs, hiring freezes, and intense competition for the limited job openings available. It can be quite frustrating, don’t you agree? I find myself in the same predicament as many other engineers. So, what can we do in such a situation? Let’s collaborate and explore some ideas together. I’ll also share what I’ve been working on during these challenging times.

On the bright side, we find ourselves with an abundance of time. Many engineers use this period to prepare for interviews by solving LeetCode problems, practicing scalable system design, refining their behavioral skills, and applying to all job openings that align with their skill set. While this may seem like a solid plan, I’ve come to the realization that it shouldn’t monopolize all of my spare time, especially given the current challenging job market, where the hiring process may take a considerable amount of time.

So, what else can we do? Before I share my ideas, let’s first establish our specific goals. Let’s list a couple of objectives:

1. Generate income to cover our bills.

2. Stay current with cutting-edge technologies to enhance our resumes.

Feel free to comment if you have another goal in mind that you’d like to share. Let’s collaborate and support each other in achieving our goals.

Photo by Ibrahim Rifath on Unsplash

Let’s delve into income-generating ideas during unemployment. One viable option is to leverage your knowledge and expertise by creating courses or blogs.

Courses and content creation:

Drawing from my past successful experience in course creation, platforms like Udemy offer a great starting point. For instance, I published a course a few years ago titled ‘ Azure Simplified! Learn what Microsoft Azure is All about!’ on Udemy. To replicate this, follow these steps:

1. Invest in a good microphone with noise cancellation.

2. Utilize video and audio editing tools.

3. Create an instructor account on Udemy and commence uploading your content.

4. Review the pre-publish checklist to ensure compliance with Udemy guidelines.

5. Publish your course.

Additionally, I collaborated with Packt Publishing to create a course on ‘Serverless App Development With NodeJs and Azure Functions.’ Packt, with its established audience, provides upfront payment, and you earn more as the course profit surpasses the initial payment. They also publish courses on platforms like Udemy, increasing visibility. However, self-marketing allows for higher earnings if you can attract students satisfied with your content.

Another avenue is authoring at Pluralsight, where I contribute to creating and maintaining Skills IQ assessments. The author community at Pluralsight is commendable.

If recording courses and all the associated work isn’t your preference, you can explore starting a blog. This avenue allows you to create written content, build an audience, and potentially generate passive income through tools like AdSense.

If you have insights or tips on content creation, feel free to share your thoughts. I can explore deeper details in a subsequent blog post if there’s interest.