Are Engineering Jobs Hard to Find?

<p>I've posted the average starting salaries of the most lucrative college majors on another forum, and the people are saying that engineering jobs are all being outsourced. They said that many people who get a degree in CS are working at fast food chains. IS THAT TRUE?</p>

<p>No. what was the other site?</p>

<p>Sounds to me like a bunch of people trying to rationalize why they didn’t do engineering.</p>

<p>Some jobs are being outsourced, and it isn’t as easy as it was a few years ago. If you graduate from a decent school with experience and a decent GPA you will more than likely find a job, though.</p>

<p>I haven’t seen any shortage of Engineering jobs out there, but they are mostly for people with already some kind of experience. If you don’t find anything at the moment maybe your best move will be to start doing a graduate degree, it will make your life easier.</p>

<p>Graduate degrees can be absolutely useless depending on what field you want to get into. Internships internships internships.</p>

<p>Engineering and CS jobs are pretty hard to find. First you have to get to a gas station or a telephone or something, and buy a newspaper or make some telephone calls. You’re talking dollars here for the paper of the phone call, and then there’s the manpower of reading the wanted ads or vibrating the old larynx.</p>

<p>Plus, there’s a catch. You need some money to do either one of those things. It’s a vicious cycle. Maybe you could sneak into a public library or something and use one of the public terminals to go to Google or something. That’s also pretty harsh. Time is money, so by spending time looking for a job you might be flushing money down the tubes.</p>

<p>Add to that the fact that once you have found the job, you generally won’t just be given it. You’ll probably have to submit a resume and a cover letter, and spend even more time talking to your future employers in an unpaid internship scenario commonly referred to as an “interview”.</p>

<p>The sick part is that at this stage they’re not even obligated to give you the job yet. You have to go home and wait or, worse still, repeat the above steps and go through the motions even more, which is more time and more money. All of this until one of them contacts you (via the phone service you have to pay for, or the mail that your taxes pay for, etc.) and tells you you have the job.</p>

<p>At this point you might feel happy, but then there’s the actually going to work thing. Life is rough.</p>

<p>So yes, finding engineering and CS jobs is tough. Better forgo formal education and get a Vaudeville act together. Some things never go out of style.</p>

<p>wouldn’t getting a master’s in engineering equivalent to B.S + a few years of experience? At least that’s what I heard…</p>

<p>Depending on what jobs you are going after maybe. If you want a supervisor type job in an industrial environment no, not at all.</p>

<p>Graduate degrees have a habit of limiting your opportunities to a certain degree. An MS doesn’t really hurt you as long as you don’t use it to specialize to a degree that makes you unmarketable. You just have to be smart about it and realize what exactly it is that an MS opens for you, which varies depending on your field.</p>

<p>“Graduate degrees have a habit of limiting your opportunities to a certain degree. An MS doesn’t really hurt you as long as you don’t use it to specialize to a degree that makes you unmarketable. You just have to be smart about it and realize what exactly it is that an MS opens for you, which varies depending on your field.”</p>

<p>I would agree with this.</p>

<p>This is why I like M.S./MEng degrees like Systems Engineering, Engineering Science, Engineering Management and just plain 'ole Engineering for a graduate degree. Each of those degrees allow like 3 to 4 courses (9 to 12 credits) to specialize in an area for your electives. The other credits give you coursework in other areas or project management. It allows you to do the technical management path (if you want) or go the pure tech route (due to your mini-specialization).</p>

<p>Also (from my experience), positions or contracts that want folks with Masters degree do not care AS MUCH (not saying don’t care at all) about your M.S./MEng major. I work in I.T. and neither my B.S. nor M.S. is in totally computer science and that was BY DESIGN.</p>

<p>That’s insulting, to say the least. I graduated 2 years ago almost to the day. I have applied to well over 5000 jobs country wide, made cold calls, walk-ins, check the USELESS newspaper ads. In total I probably had about 100 peaple call me, about 15 interviews and 0 job offers. Get off your high horse. If you don’t believe its harder than hell to find a job, then build and resume that a typical new graduate with no experience has, and try it for yourself and see how many response YOU get!</p>

<p>^what degree do u have? And from what location?</p>

<p>er867897, a typical new engineering graduate does not have “no experience”. Most of them do internships, co-ops, or at least work part time during school, so that they have some concept of the real world when they get out. Didn’t you?</p>

<p>I think that if you are an engineering student who is a US citizen with a GPA of above a 3.5, some work experience, writing and interpersonal skills, and is active in college extracurriculars, there is no difficulty finding a good job.</p>

<p>What school?
GPA?
Internships?
Schools career services?
Field of study?</p>

<p>Those are all way more important factors than the logistics of how many resumes you sent out.</p>

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<p>Sorry to hear that, but to be perfectly honest that’s a lot of interviews. </p>

<p>One of the major draws of engineering is the job security. When I started my undergraduate, I was under the impression that job security was “perfect”, in the sense that all graduates with GPA > 2.5 received at least one professional job offer, even if it’s not their first choice or in an ideal location. Unfortunately the recession appears to have changed that.</p>

<p>Depends largely on the individual. </p>

<p>Multiple offers here starting with full benefits above the 60k mark + incentives + relocation packages. Same story with a few of my colleagues. The people I know who’ve been having a really hard time finding a job are those which have poor or no work experience, no research experience, mediocre grades, poor writing skills, poor interpersonal skills, etc.</p>

<p>If you are having a difficult time finding a job with decent grades and experience, go to your school’s career center. Have your resume looked over a few times, do some mock interviews, and start going to every career event you can find. I received calls from companies for interviews that I didn’t even apply at but somehow found my resume.</p>

<p>There are plenty of engineering jobs out there up for grabs. As for the issue of outsourcing, there are far too many variables and subsects of each engineering industry to confidently say that: “yes, do not major in engineering because the U.S. will no longer produce ANY technology in-house, repair technology, develop technology, and will outsource everything to foreign countries, etc.” I guess we’ll be outsourcing everything for the development and manufacture of the next generation fighter jets (software, hardware, etc.) to India.</p>

<p>Son’s undergrad class had 100% either employed or heading to grad school at the time of graduation. Many students got job offers via connections at co-ops or internships. </p>

<p>It seems to me that if your degree name is the same as your job title, it’s usually pretty easy to get a job (ex: engineer, pharmacist, accountant, nurse, etc.) A notable exception might be architect.</p>

<p>

The recession has officially been over since June 2009 (<a href=“http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/the-recession-has-officially-ended/[/url]”>http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/the-recession-has-officially-ended/&lt;/a&gt;), so your comment is not relevant to this thread. Today, an unemployed person’s lack of job is their fault, not that of “the economy”.</p>