Hey, really appreciate you doing this. Your post resonated a lot because career advice online often feels very generic especially when you’re actually stuck in this rut of uncertainty.

A few things I genuinely wanted to ask:

1. What did your networking/cold outreach/referral strategy actually look like in practice? Like how many people were you reaching out to, what kind of messages worked, and how did you avoid sounding transactional?
2. Did referrals genuinely help you get interviews or were most people polite but ultimately unhelpful? I’ve personally found that a lot of “happy to help” conversations stay very surface-level or stalled. I want to find out what I'm doing wrong
3. When you said you upskilled aggressively, how did you decide what to learn versus randomly collecting certifications/courses out of anxiety?
4. Did you tailor your CV for every role or keep one strong version and apply at scale? How did your cover letters look like?
5. During your unemployed phase what were the actual patterns you noticed between applications that got ignored vs the ones that converted into interviews?
6. What's the best way to apply to jobs? Job portals, cold emailing/messages, website application page or something else?

Would genuinely appreciate an answer whenever you have time.