I have a Master's Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (graduated in 2010). I took courses in the areas of signal processing and digital communications. I have also had teaching and research experience (journal papers) in the same and a couple of internships.
Right after graduation I started working as a verification engineer (working with Verilog, systemverilog, ovm testplans etc). Worked there for about a year. Right now I work as the sole Quality Assurance person at a dot com (coding in Python, writing test plans, setting up an automated testing environment etc).
Both my job choices were influenced by financial and personal reasons.
I now want to go back to working with communication and DSP software. An ideal position would be as a developer working in close tandem with a research team.
However, most similar positions listed on job/company sites require a recent college grad or a M.S degree with 2-3 years of relevant experience.
I am no longer a recent grad and though I have work experience, it is varied. This is the daunting part because I am not sure my resume will be picked up in the initial scan either by the software or the recruiter. Once I am at the interview stage I know I can perform well, but how do I get past this roadblock and end up being called for the interview?
Edit: Cannot seem to post comments so here goes:
Thank you @jcmeloni for the link. @pdr you have nailed the subtle difference that i was trying to put in words. The post linked to by @jcmeloni seems to question the correlation between skills and the years of experience. I get that part totally. If that weren't so i wouldn't be looking for recent graduate jobs.My dilemma is that recent graduate jobs are for recent graduates and the ones with 2-3 years of experience want "relevant" experience. My degree is in the relevant field, for example i know the theory behind wireless communication,have written code for protocol simulation (MATLAB,C,C++) and come up with new formulas. But my development experience in this field has not been for real world applications.Just trying to explain my background here. @Rarity No the top answer in that other post does not answer my question. I will edit this post based on your feedback, but i will have to think just a little bit. Please hang on till then.