<p>^^More good news! :)</p>
<p>^^</p>
<p>For instance, one company that was listed as having received roughly 500 million in money from the DOE, I know is hiring engineers (mechanical and electrical) as fast as they can get them.</p>
<p>OTOH, I know one recent ME grad from a well-respected tech school who is working sales at an outdoor retailer (think REI). However, she chose to be extremely geographically bound (due to her SO), and I’m not exactly sure she really wants to work as an engineer anyway, so…</p>
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<p>Oh my, how very hard it is to believe this. I have come to the conclusion that when hiring managers say that ‘talent’ is hard to find, what they really are saying is ‘tech people 3-5 years out of school (i.e. low salary reqs) with precisely the list of skills/acronyms I want’ are hard to find. I simply can not believe that they can’t find older tech people, or new grads.</p>
<p>Take a look at the comments posted on that “Tech Jobs Plentiful, Talent Is Not - Yahoo! Finance” article. Those sorts of comments are very typical for this sort of article. There is a large pool of underemployed and unemployed tech people missing one acronym or of a certain age who ought to be able to learn whatever it is that these ‘struggling’ managers want. Companies just want more H1B visas (cheap labor) and no-brainer hiring choices IMO.</p>
<p>Treetop, H1B’s are hardly no-brainers. My company resorts to non-green card holders when we absolutely have exhausted any reasonable method of finding people. It is a canard that companies would rather bring over foreigners- it is expensive, it is cumbersome, you somehow never get the people where and when you need them, our hiring managers and division heads still don’t understand the difference between all the acronyms and complications. (We have one senior person who always insists "just bring them in as an “Exceptional Alien” or something… like that’s so easy, and doesn’t chew up thousands of dollars in legal fees and takes forever to boot…).</p>
<p>Yes, it would be great if somehow all the textile factory workers and widget designers who are out of work could somehow be transformed into the kind of workers where there are shortages. But these displaced workers aren’t quite as flexible as you’d like them to be- whenever I’ve tried hiring mass quantities of them I discover that they own houses in places where we don’t have operations (and therefore don’t want to move), they don’t want an overseas rotation in two years to help develop their careers, they don’t want to sit in a classroom in one of our training “boot camps” to learn an entirely new skill set.</p>
<p>So yeah, would be so great to scoop up the unemployed in one big orgy of a labor market comeback. But for now, it’s frankly easier to hire a kid fresh out of Cal Tech or U Illinois and send him or her to “charm school”, than it is to re-tool someone whose tech skills are out of date.</p>
<p>Heard something on the radio just today…they interviewed an older guy who was using up his 99 weeks of unemployment and reluctantly deciding to go on social security early at age 62 b/c he couldn’t find anything. He remarked that companies didn’t want “older workers” and declared he had “forgotten more than those youngsters would ever learn.” </p>
<p>Maybe, but maybe the problem is he had forgotten some and not learned more to keep his skills up to date.</p>
<p>My kids were “scooped up” right after graduation (CS majors) but I am warning them to not expect their salaries to continue the upward trajectory predicted by the initial level, and to keep their skills current.</p>
<p>Older workers in our country, unlike in many other countries are handicapped because we don’t have national health care and almost free education. Employers prefer younger workers because they’re healthier and don’t have families. Retraining or keeping up with your skills can be a very expensive proposition. I priced a graduate degree at my state college - $30,000. Not affordable by everyone. I know a guy who got retrained with an MS in computer science and then, 10 years later, his job was outsourced to India. Not everyone has the money and energy to keep investing that much in new careers.</p>
<p>By the way, I posted a while back. My daughter got a job! Yay! Only a couple of weeks before graduation.</p>
<p>S went on his first job interview today. He was offered the job with a start date of tomorrow. It isn’t his dream job. It starts out just 20 hours a week and the pay isn’t great but has potential to go full time. He doesn’t know if he wants to take it! He feels like he wants something more exciting. We are pushing him to take the job. It is in his field, he can live at home, he will learn something.
Tonight he got an email from an internship in Silicon Valley. They want to do a short initial phone interview with him. He is excited. The job is 40 hours but at least for now just 3 months. A much more exciting job with more “bling”.
Hard call. Go with the sure thing job that isn’t all that exciting or go for the internship with a start-up company with potential.
He will start the local job tomorrow and we shall see where it goes.</p>
<p>One of the other unspoken issues is that more experienced workers may be unwilling to take a cut in pay and get retrained to take new responsibilities. Employers would just as soon train new workers that they can hire at lower starting salaries with fewer benefits and expectations. That’s a big issue at H’s workplace & with several of our friends who are engineers and other skilled professionals.</p>
<p>Companies are also more likely to contract out & have contractors take over duties rather than hire & have to be on the hook for benefits, etc. It is a complicated issue.</p>
<p><a href=“Hiring Slowdown Seen for Small Business - The New York Times”>Hiring Slowdown Seen for Small Business - The New York Times;
<p>The federation’s report for May showed the worst hiring prospects in eight months. The finding provides a glimpse into the pessimism of the nation’s small firms as they put together their budgets for the coming season, and depicts a more gloomy outlook than other recent (if equally lackluster) economic indicators because this one is forward-looking.</p>
<p>While big companies are buoyed by record profits, many small businesses, which employ half of the country’s private sector workers, are still struggling to break even. And if the nation’s small companies plan to further delay hiring — or, worse, return to laying off workers, as they now hint they might — there is little hope that the nation’s 14 million idle workers will find gainful employment soon.</p>
<p>“Never in the 37-year history of our company have we seen anything at all like this,” said Frank W. Goodnight, president of Diversified Graphics, a publishing company in Salisbury, N.C. He says there is “no chance” he will hire more workers in the months ahead.</p>
<p>“We’re being squeezed on all sides,” he says.</p>
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<p>Clearly looking for work at big companies over small companies may make for better job security. I just noticed that Lockheed Martin is laying off 7.5% of its workforce with an unusually large hit to middle-management.</p>
<p>Son met the professor and started working today though I think that the paperwork is to come. The work is interesting and makes big use of the product that I work on and he should have a few very marketable skills when he is done.</p>
<p>That’s great to hear, BCEagle.</p>
<p>One of the points I do not think most people understand about the older worker’s plight is that they can not even get one interview. They do not even have a chance to answer the questions about lower pay, moves, or boot camps. They send out hundreds of resumes and get absolutely nowhere.</p>
<p>I know so many who would jump at the chance to make much less, if only someone would offer. Hiring managers see their age and reject them immediately.</p>
<p>My daughter filled out her 100th job application today. As she says, there are 100 less teacher wannabe’s in the pool now, so she’s still optimistic.</p>
<p>Not sure if this is the right venue to ask this question, but does anyone have advice about “job shadowing”? </p>
<p>My son, a rising junior, is desperate for a (consulting) internship and unfortunately didn’t get anything 6 months ago when he initially started this effort. Said his “sophomore-ness was holding him back”, but the truth is, his resume looked horrible. With a little help, he has been more successful getting interviews, but now I’m not so sure these companies are legit. </p>
<p>When he researches them, lots of “scam” reviews come up. Then, all three places where interviewed this week told him the next step in the process is job shadowing. One place told him the job shadowing goes from 10am-6pm and to wear comfortable shoes. By now, he’s heard the routine enough that he didn’t ask what exactly he’ll be doing that whole time. He’s willing to take the risk that nothing will pan out, (i.e. working for no pay) but I kinda worry. It’s one thing to work for 8 hours without pay, but it’s another to be in danger. Can anyone please advise me!</p>
<p>Could you point one of these out (as in a web link)? I’ve never heard of this before. I have heard of traditional job shadowing - as done by high-school students so that they can learn more about jobs before deciding what they want to major in in college - I haven’t heard it used in a college internship context.</p>
<p>This one was a “for sure don’t go there”:
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<p>I’ll send you others via a PM.</p>
<p>Looks like it is a real jungle out there.</p>
<p>This is one of the reasons I started my non-profit. I didn’t want to deal with the interviewing, hiring, etc. so decided to create my own non-profit to deal with a pressing issue that was being ignored in my community, despite my repeated pleas about it. It has worked well so far, though it is a LOT of work & I do love it. It takes a LOT of skills I never knew I had and some I don’t (that I am either getting help from others or hiring).</p>
<p>Life is full, but we can navigate it pretty well if we work at it. :)</p>
<p>It bothers me that older workers aren’t treated with more respect and given more options instead of having it assumed that retraining won’t work or be profitable for the company. It really seems so wrong on many levels and would greatly undermine morale!</p>
<p>What is a “consulting internship”? Most financial/accounting firms reserve consulting work to well-seasoned employees.</p>