5 Years Into Systems Engineering. Hate it, but can't pass any interviews to leave. Lean into the skid?
My resume: I have a bachelors in EE and a masters in EE focusing on VLSI.
I got hired on to a Big Tech company as a "design engineer", but there was 0 design to it. It was a weird-ass role custom built by one manager, but it was kind of like systems engineering. The biggest part of it was meetings with stakeholders where I drove some high-level requirements and documented action items. They laid me and my manager off after 3 years and sent that job to India.
After that, I ended up at an aerospace company working as an actual systems engineer. I've spent 2 years here, and so far, my primary job skills have been copy/pasting screenshots of other people's work into a Powerpoint deck, and copy/pasting values from an Excel sheet into a Word sheet. I shit you not, I have literally worn the paint off of the C and V keys on my desktop.
I'm getting frustrated with these zero skill growth, low value add, copy/paste bullshit jobs, and wanted to get back to technical work like design.
Here's the thing... I've got a couple technical job interviews, and they have gone BAD. After 5 years of writing Powerpoints, and 0 years doing design, I'm getting smoked the fuck out. When they start drilling down into how I would bring up a PCB, it becomes pretty apparent that it's been half a decade since I've handled a PCB.
So I want to be technical, but I have zero chops to be technical. Those skills have just eroded.
At this point... do I just lean into the documentation skid, and start asking my boss for opportunities to start learning project engineering / program management? Do some similar kind of work to what I'm doing, but more transferrable and higher-value? Does it get better than copy/pasting?
Or do I just act like I'm a fresh grad, enroll in some online graduate classes (they cost about $3k a pop, and I'm not sure my current job would pay for them b/c I already have a masters), build PCBs or something as a side project, and try and re-launch a technical career from square one.