Transitioning out of Quality/Technician
Hello everybody, I am here to ask about some career advice. First of all, I am from the Vancouver BC area. I am graduating this month with my bachelors of applied science degree in electrical engineering (in reality it was more electronics focused), with an upper year gpa of around 3.85/4.33. I previously held a quality engineer internship at a power electronics company for about a year. I have some electronics design and PCB projects such as a PID robot and also a piezo energy harvesting system during university and my own time.
I applied throughout my final year to many positions, had an unsuccessful process engineer interview at a semiconductor company and another unsuccessful interview for a quality engineer position at the company I interned at.
I know Vancouver isn’t exactly great for electronics, but would love to stay here if possible because of family reasons, but I will also be looking outside. In the last 2 months I decided to also apply for some technician jobs because I wasn’t getting much from my applications and ended up landing interviews really quickly and received an offer for a quality assurance technician role at an aerospace company which I accepted for financial reasons.
I would love to work in some sort of electronics or electrical design role (I think), but I feel my internship has almost locked me in as a quality guy as I never had much success landing any interviews for other roles.
I plan on continuing to work on building my portfolio, but would appreciate advice for wanting to transition out of technician/quality eventually into engineering. And I would love suggestions for projects worth doing that are not just to stand out, but for my own learning that wouldn’t kill my wallet.
TLDR; about to graduate with a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering and quality internship experience, but landed a technician job which I need for income, asking advice for how to transition eventually out of technician/quality into engineering.