Context engineer in manufacturing. I’ve been at my current job for 5 months. It’s not great and I’m looking to move on. However, I want to stay long enough that I can have it on my resume without awkward questions. How long do you think that should be?
I would feel weird listing anything less than a year. I feel like it takes a year to really get up to speed on a job, in engineering anyway, before you’re out of training and really say if it’s for you. (I’m not talking about actually miserable conditions like bad team, bad safety, etc.)
It depends. I agree with your take about engineering jobs taking time to get up to speed on, but you also need to balance it with not having a gap.
Personally, for it being a current job I would list it. Five months may not be enough to get up to speed, but it’s definitely long enough to identify a bad fit, and I wouldn’t want hiring managers to go “So what were you doing for the last half a year?”.
I’d also stay in the job while job hunting. Most job markets are absolutely fucked right now. Thousands of applicants for every posting.
Once it drops down in-between longer jobs, I would drop it down to maybe a single line of title, employer, start and end date. Eventually it’s more about the skills demonstrated in relation with the jobs than the jobs themselves, so a single line note to indicate you weren’t unemployed is fine.
Companies can get weird when they get the idea you can survive for months with no income. They don’t like the idea that you could easily walk off.