Harry Gries is an experienced ASIC designer, applications engineer and consultant who writes the popular EDA blog Harry the ASIC Guy. At DAC this summer, Harry hosted three highly informative sessions at Synopsys Conversation Central focused on how to use social media to find a new job in the EDA industry. The sessions were called “Job Search: How Social Media Can Help Job Seekers and Employers,” and Harry summarizes some of the key content in the following interview.

Rick: During your sessions at Synopsys’ Conversation Central, you presented a unique mnemonic phrase: GLACNJBP. Please unpack what that means.

Harry: The first letters of that mnemonic spell out the expression “Good Leaders Are Creating New Jobs. Be Prepared.” First off, I do think that good leaders, those who are not panicking and who are instead treating this downturn as an opportunity, are indeed looking to create new jobs because there are so many experienced and talented people out there and  available. So there are and will be opportunities, but there will also be fierce competition for those opportunities.

The first letters of the mnemonic also stand for some of the approaches you can take for using social media to help you find that position:

G is for Google. One of the first things that I or a prospective employer will do to learn a bit about you is to Google your name. Have you tried doing this yourself? Will prospective employers find pictures of you drinking in college? Or find a paper you wrote for a conference? Depending on what’s there to find, you may need to clean up your online rep.

L is for LinkedIn. I have spoken to many hiring managers and recruiters and all of them say that LinkedIn is the new resume, the first place they go to find out who you are and who you know so they can “check you out.” You should cultivate your LinkedIn profile like a resume. As a general rule, an experienced professional with 10 years experience should have 100+ connections, be members of at least half a dozen LinkedIn groups, and have at least one recommendation per position you had.

A is for Announce. Losing your job can be embarrassing, but its not the time to be proud. It’s important to announce your status if you’re between jobs. How else would your networks know that you’re available? You can update your status on LinkedIn, update Facebook, use Twitter, and even good old fashioned email and phone calls.

C is for Community. There are technical and personal communities everywhere in which you can find and interact with others that share common interests. They cover a variety of disciplines, from verification to low-power to embedded processing and more. Join them. Participate in them. Comment on blogs. Contribute to forums. Being seen as someone who’s interesting and willing to help is never a bad thing.

N is for Network. Possibly the most traditional, networking is still extremely valuable. And keeping in touch with colleagues has never been easier than with tools like LinkedIn and Facebook. You can use LinkedIn to identify people you know at a company that you are targeting. From them you can find out more about the position and even get your resume on the hiring managers desk with a personal recommendation. Of course, networks, like plants, are healthiest when fed constantly so hopefully you’ve been nurturing your network before you need it.

J is for Job Boards. They’re helpful to both employers and job seekers. Monster and HotJobs are well-known names and Ive also heard good things about Dice, Indeed and Simplyhired.com — and even Craigslist. Most of these are free so expect a lot of people to be using these sites and any position to get a lot of applicants. Good time to invoke your network and see if you can get in behind the firewall.

B is for Blog. If you like to write and have something interesting to say, blogging is definitely worth a try. Sharing your expertise and showing your personality on a blog is a way to bring credibility to yourself. If starting or maintaining a blog is overwhelming, try posting comments on other people’s blogs. You can always contact me for advice on this.

P is for Prepare Your Skills. It’s important to keep up your skills especially when you are out of work. There are so many free online webinars and other learning opportunities today that there is no excuse for not brushing up and enhancing your skills. And at least one EDA company is offering free customer training to unemployed engineers on a space-available basis, so take advantage if you can.

Rick: As an electrical engineer and early blogger in the EDA space, why did you originally start blogging and what motivates you to continue?

Harry: I’ve spent a lot of my career learning how to communicate effectively and always enjoyed writing. I also felt like I had a lot of insights that I wanted to share with people. I was discussing this with a friend of mine, Ron Ploof, and he said “You should start a blog.” I thought about it and decided to go ahead. I guess its a way to express my opinions to a larger audience and have some influence in the industry.

As an independent consultant, it was also a way to establish and enhance my reputation and get more exposure. Previously, I was pretty much anonymous in the industry except among those with whom I’d worked. This year at DAC, most of the people I met for the first time said something like, “Oh, youre the ASIC guy,” so it seems to have worked.

What keeps me going is that there is so much to write about and so much changing in the industry. Some want to declare EDA to be dead but I disagree. If anything, EDA is more critical than ever because these massively complex chips would be absolutely impossible to design without these tools. Also, on my blog Ive become one the main advocates for cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service for EDA tools which I believe will transform the industry and enable smaller companies to be more effective. That cause keeps me motivated as well.

Rick: From your perspective as a new media-savvy EE, do you see any unique opportunities or concerns within engineering communities that influence their adoption and use of social media?

Harry: Yes. I see both concerns and opportunities and it depends on what you call “new media.” Most people define new media as those technologies popularized in the last 3-4 years: blogs, podcasts, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and so on. At this point, Id estimate that 90 percent of those in EE using new media for professional purposes are in marketing, sales, public relations, and other roles where they interact with people from other companies and the industry on a daily basis. I have not seen as much of the hands-on engineer adopting social media… yet.

There are concerns about social media being a distraction and waste of time, of the ability of engineers to communicate, of potential proprietary information leaking out, of security and bandwidth, and also whether the content is really relevant to an engineers daily work. These concerns are not unlike the early 90s when companies expressed concern over their engineers wasting time on the Internet. I think a similar process will occur as companies allow — and then encourage — more social media over time.

Although engineers may be late to the new media party, they have had their own party which is the old fashioned bulletin boards and online forums where they have been interacting, sharing, and collaborating for some time. I think engineers will actually get more benefit out of the collaboration enabled by social media. This is already happening within some companies internally using tools like Wikis for collaboration and blogs and micro-blogs for internal communication. As an industry I think there is an even greater opportunity for collaboration between and amongst companies, as long as we can get past the felt need to consider everything as proprietary. For instance, if I have a script that integrates two tools, that script could be shared open source with other engineers in the industry and wed all not have to re-invent the wheel. Right now, however, most employers would consider that script as a competitive advantage and want to keep it internal. We need to figure out as an industry how to collaborate on tools like these and focus on keeping the real family jewels locked up.

Rick: What are some of the projects you are involved with these days.

Harry: Im doing technical consulting work most of the time and that is important for me to stay close to the technology and tools and what is going on. Ive recently started working part-time with Xuropa, a company that shares my vision of putting EDA tools on “the cloud” to make them more accessible to engineers and to help EDA companies do more with less. Ive also got my hands in a few other things: doing some research for one company, working with a company that does consulting to consulting companies to help them be more effective.

Ive informally advised some companies on new media, and Ive been asked to develop a few webinars which Im trying to find the time for. None of these opportunities would have likely been there had it not been for the blog, so it really has helped me to get more involved in the industry. Ive learned through this downturn that engineers dont have guaranteed jobs and need to have their hands in a lot of different areas because they never know how or when the economy will turn. You always need options and its nice to have them.

I’m also helping my wife with her business that develops child safety products. Your readers can find out more about this on a recent blog post of mine at http://theasicguy.com/2009/10/22/honey-i-tattooed-the-kids/.