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With the right skills and experience, engineers can go far in their career. Yet, engineers in any industry—from budding professionals to seasoned veterans —need meaningful connections to enrich their knowledge, find new opportunities, and foster career or personal growth. By putting your best foot forward in front of the right people, you open doors to new job opportunities and career growth.

But networking doesn’t come easy—at first. Many of us can suffer from awkwardness, social anxiety, and discomfort when meeting new people or asking for career help. While it can be stressful to establish these connections, anyone can earn and maintain meaningful relationships by following a few simple steps.

As a hiring manager, you’ll often face the challenging decision of choosing between multiple highly qualified candidates for one open role. And once you’ve made your selection and sent a job offer, you’ll have to break the news to the candidates who didn’t make the cut. Without careful planning and sensitivity, these rejections can leave candidates with a negative impression of your organization.  

While it may be easier to send a curt rejection response, impersonal communications can hurt your company’s reputation and affect your ability to attract top engineering talent in the future. Even if you’ve already made your hiring decision, putting some extra thought into rejection calls or emails can open opportunities for future job openings or contract work.

In this article, we’ll explore a few simple ways to create a considerate (and painless) experience when rejecting engineering candidates.

Hiring top engineers and chip experts in today’s competitive and candidate-driven job market can be challenging. From crafting tailored job descriptions to coordinating technical interviews, each step in the hiring process requires careful consideration. And with changes in technology and shifting demographics, hiring managers need new, creative ways to find and attract qualified candidates. Over time, you may feel your once tried-and-true efforts are losing their effectiveness.

If your current strategies aren’t performing to your standards, considering new perspectives can help you refresh your hiring tactics and access top talent.

Here are three simple ways to rethink some hiring practices:

When it comes to achieving optimal performance and function, analog design is difficult to get right. According to Semiconductor Engineering, analog content causes the most test and chip failures. Additionally, a Cadence report shows that 95 percent of field failures come from analog elements in the design.

As more designs go digital, analog becomes increasingly crucial to enhance better user experience in the chip interface. This means the standards for reliability also increase—adding more stress to quality and performance.

We’re now three months into 2019, and a lot has happened in the semiconductor space. As we ramp up for the spring hustle, we’ve got a lot to celebrate, including new events and breakthroughs and record industry growth.

Every quarter, we like to highlight the latest news that impacts semiconductor companies. Our aim is to provide busy hiring managers with a quick rundown of all industry happenings. Here’s what you need to know about what’s happened in the first quarter of 2019:

Another day, another new design and system challenge. It may seem like every day you face an obstacle that questions your merit, skill, and competence. If you can’t solve it, you may have a sinking feeling that another engineer— someone smarter or more talented than you— can. Over time, no matter how long your track record of accomplishments is, you may begin to suspect that you got lucky or that you don’t belong in your job. This nagging sense of fraudulence is known as imposter syndrome.

Trying to create more gender parity in your organization is a tough but worthwhile goal. Unfortunately, gender bias— even if it’s not intended— is quite common in the tech and chip industry, where organizations tend to promote and favor masculine actions and behavior. Negative peer pressure, harassment, and skewed representation of women who pursue careers in STEM fields are also major problems in workplaces and the culture at large. There’s no denying that women face and experience unique barriers to success. But many are making strides that shatter the glass ceiling and prove that female engineers, developers, or scientists are crucial to innovation and creative problem-solving.

Sometimes things don’t go quite as planned. You commit to checking off a few tasks for the day, and suddenly a change to the budget or revision in the project brief takes you back to square one. What was supposed to be a clear and straightforward project now requires longer development times, more resources, or aggressive deadlines. The productive day you wished for took a turn didn’t expect. This phenomenon, called scope creep, happens to the best of us.

New technology has a way of keeping us on our toes with impressive advanced features and architecture. But this innovation also creates new challenges that ratchets up the need for top talent. But for veteran and new engineers alike, that raises the question: what skills do engineers need to keep up?

Engineers can bring a lot to the table with a good balance of soft and hard skills. However, growth and mastery in any career field requires continuous learning and practice. In our article, we’ll explore which in-demand engineering skill sets are expected to grow in 2019.

Any engineer knows that coding, testing, and designing products requires intense concentration. “Being in the zone” is critical for many engineering tasks as juggling several variables in your head demand laser focus. Engineers in this state of flow— where knowledge, motivation, and focus all magically align— can produce more quality work in a single afternoon than in days of non-flow.

But as most engineers also know, this state of flow is elusive. As soon as you buckle down to do engineering work, intrusions may shift your attention. Before you know it, you’re waist-deep in two or three other unanticipated tasks. In an era of endless Slack messages and open workspaces, we’re bombarded by distractions. In reality, doing real engineering work can seem few and far between when interruptions are pulling you away from complete focus on important projects.