<p>I was reading some stories about people who graduated with Engineering degrees and were never able to find a job in their field. What would be some of the reasons? Bad schools? No internships?</p>
<p>I am currently attending Iowa State University, I am majoring in Industrial Engineering and so far I have been very pleased with our Career Center. </p>
<p>I feel like they really care about every student getting an internship as soon as we are able to and as much as I am skeptical of some of the BS these universities tell you, they claim to have an almost 100% placement rate at graduation for people in the College of Engineering</p>
<p>One of my IE professors made us First Year Engineering students go to the Engineering Career Fair last month just to become familiar with the event, ask recruiters questions, etc and I thought that was really cool.</p>
<p>I really would like to believe that by the time I graduate I will have a few internships under my belt and hopefully a job lined up but I would like to understand some of the things that may make an Engineering student unemployable at graduation.</p>
<p>Graduating during an industry downturn, such as civil engineering class of 2009-2012, or computer science/engineering class of 2001-2003.</p>
<p>Marginal academic record when graduating in any other than an industry boom time. Some employers may have GPA cut-offs for determining who gets considered for an interview. Those with worse GPAs will have a harder time getting to the interviews (and may be less able to answer technical questions if their GPA reflects their knowledge learned in the courses).</p>
<p>Poor job search skills, including marketing and selling oneself. This can make a bigger impact if one is at a less heavily recruited school, where one would have to find and apply to employers oneself instead of seeing them at the career center.</p>
<p>If, for any of the above reasons, the graduate fails to get a job shortly after graduation, and does not go to graduate school or other “respectable” activity, then the stigma of long term unemployment makes it much more difficult to get a job in the future.</p>
<p>I’m not an engineer, but my brother graduated last year from a big state school with a chemical engineering degree. He said that kids without at least one internship had difficulties finding jobs. He also said that a lot of people had trouble getting internships in the first place due to either their grades being too low or having weird or arrogant personalities.</p>
<p>I can’t help but wonder if the flood of foreign born, US educated engineers (like myself 30 years ago :)) and temporary visas has not created a bubble where a graduate engineering degree is pretty much a requirement for any decent engineering job.</p>
<p>Internships and co-ops are great, I’ve had a few co-op students and they’re all doing great, but I am not really convinced of the value of them in terms of developing the so-called ‘work ethic’ or equally so-called ‘real world skills’. What we do is not really far out (your neighborhood embedded Linux stuff) but still I’ll take knowledge of some obscure Linux topic or another over having spent 4 months as an intern any time. That’s me tho. Based on resumes we see flying what seems to matter is more school (Big 10), degree (MS), and GPA.</p>
<p>As a dual major, one of which being Industrial Engineering, I’ll tell you this:</p>
<p>I’ve never heard of anyone majoring in IE and not getting a job, but they have to try a whole lot harder than those in my other major (CS) to do so. And the internship/job search process is an awful experience. If you work hard, most likely you’ll find an internship or at least a full time job somewhere. But you have to actually try hard to get one. Don’t take it lightly. Apply all over the place, make sure your resume is strong, apply all over the place and give cover letters for each. It’s boring and can take a lot of time, but you have to do it. </p>
<p>Industrial Engineers certainly have better prospects than Civil Engineers or most liberal arts majors, but there’s very little slack you can take advantage of in the job search process.</p>
<p>Yeah I can “second” the whole thing about graduating at the wrong time and/or in the wrong field. For instance, in the 1990s, civil engineers had a huge uphill battle finding employment. The geologists/mining engineering types basically faced 20 years of underemployment. A new domestically designed nuclear reactor hasn’t been ordered in nearly 30 years, and the field already had a large contingent of ‘nuclear’ engineers trained in the 1970s – graduates on the tail end of that construction boom faced a really hard 80s and 90s. </p>
<p>EE/ECE/Software Engineering has had a really hard time in the past decade, because most positions have been filled not with new grads, but rather, with imported talent on the H-1B visa. </p>
<p>When a field collapses in demand, I believe that its actually to the benefit of people who didn’t do so well grades-wise, or who didn’t intern. After all, they can just apply to jobs in complimentary fields, and they’ll be taken seriously. Its the top quartile, top half of the class that faces the real difficulty, or the former interns. Because employers outside the field simply don’t accept that they’ll stick with their complimentary jobs over the long term. </p>
<p>I personally saw a lot of this in Canada in EE/ECE/Software in the 2000s. Firms gladly hired grads with no internship and no particular ambitions or super-high grades. The high grade folks, the people who had internships, were basically told, “you’re overqualified”, or “you’ll just be snapped up by Nortel/Cisco/Google, we’re not going to take a chance on you!”. Most of the ones I know are still either doing Masters/PhD’s, or are otherwise unemployed or underemployed. A real crying shame, especially since there are oodles of foreigners sitting in tech firms for which they could do those jobs.</p>
<p>Remember: its a mistake to <em>always</em> think that employers are looking for the highest GPA, or to hire the most competent people. There’s a lot of industries and jobs out there for which the employers are just looking for a warm body. Usually when a field collapses, its the R&D function that gets hit the first and hit the worst. So the top of the class gets hit disproportionately hard, as well as the M.Sc./PhD research degree holders.</p>
<p>Mark77, you are correct that they are not always look for the highest gpa. What they want are people with good work ethic, abiding to the company’s vision and fit well with the team.</p>
<p>Yes, engineering school is important, but once you get out to the real world what you learn in school has little to do with what is being done in the industry. I had a meeting that actually involves my past control system professor once as well as other industry representatives and you would have no idea how the once thought super-smart professor is speechless and actually told us he is clueless as to how control systems are being used in the industry. He is still super smart, dont get me wrong, but acedemia is too different than let say O&G.</p>
<p>Most employers need to train you from the ground up anyways, and so what they want to see is your attitude in the workplace, maturity and social skills. As long as you met their bare minimum in terms of gpa, they know that you can learn for the job, what they want to see is your other qualities that is shown through your cover letter and during the interview, that is how you shine in front the employer, not your gpa.</p>
<p>Yes, Nortel has gone down and that did chipped the ece jobs a bit, but the industry has long moved on. The current market is not as bad as you have thought. The east canada might be a little weak, but the west side, especially alberta is very strong. Maybe you should move to the west?</p>
<p>I can assure you, in Canada, there’s been no ECE recovery, and no resumption of hiring of grads in the field. For the people who even get interviews, they’re still competing with ex-Nortel folks with tons of experience – for entry level positions! Especially in the west, which has seen most of its ECE-type jobs and companies ‘crowded out’ by the oil and gas/resource industry. </p>
<p>The career centre at my alma mater has never been so devoid of even new grad and internship postings as it is today. And everyone I know in the field is basically hanging on for dear life.</p>
<p>Telling the truth isn’t unique. I have the benefit of being out there and seeing what has really been going on. Which certainly is a refreshing counterbalance to those who claim its all sunshine and lollipops for engineers. When, quite clearly, a lot of people just repeat what they read in the newspaper (usually lies) about demand in the profession.</p>
<p>that just means I must have been living in an alternate reality all these years of which me and most of my classmates as well as the students that come after us got employment as an ECE graduate. </p>
<p>You dont need to assure me, I am currently living and working in Alberta as an electrical engineer and I have absolutely no idea what your claims are based on. If you go to indeed or even monster or even in linkedin you would see there are alot of job postings that are relevant to the ece field. I also see cases where new grads got hired for positions that requires 3-10 years of experience because nobody applies (and that is a designer engineer job). </p>
<p>I may consider myself lucky, but most of the people I know got a job in their right field within a year after graduation.</p>
<p>Mark is absolutely right. Many young people have this illusion that they are going to get a degree in Engineering and everything will be fine and dandy after that. Sorry but life does not work that way.</p>
<p>I am 36, I am working on my 2nd degree now(IE) and honestly, I have absolutely no expectations of anything at this point.</p>
<p>I have worked for several different companies, busted my ass since I was 16 and trust me, it is not easy to establish yourself in this horrible economy, even when you have good experience, good contacts and do everything right</p>
<p>Career Services ain’t gonna tell you these things about real life but I know Electrical Engineers who worked their butts off in school, got a good job after school, did everything right just to be laid off 20 years later and some were never able to find another job in the field due to their age and/or salary expectations.</p>
<p>I am not trying to discourage anybody BUT a lot of young people have a very distorted view of how things work in the “real world”</p>
<p>As an aerospace major who wants to focus on space exploration, my wife understands I will likely not find a job upon graduation and that my career will require sacrifice on both our parts as I move in and out of employment, relocate, and testify before congress for more funding. That said, there really is not a scenario where she won’t have a job for the foreseeable future (excluding getting hit by a bus, zombie apocalypse, etc.) and so we’ve made the choice to live off only her income, with any “extra” I bring in for retirement, kids college fund, home improvements, etc.</p>
<p>My hope is that market forces will drive away all the “wannabes” and only those that are really capable and driven remain in the field. There’s a quote that comes to mind “I shall either find a way… or make one.”</p>
<ul>
<li>Graduated from a non-Top 10 school (Michigan State)</li>
<li>With a B.S. in Computational Mathematics…used as a “sneak in the back door” major for not being admitted to the school’s CS program</li>
<li>Undergrad GPA was well below 3.0</li>
<li>No internships</li>
<li>No AP credits</li>
<li>Used work-study job as a “computer specialist” for some department of the school’s College of Medicine to count as “internship”</li>
<li>Still was hired right out of college by Westinghouse as software engineer with INGRES</li>
<li>Ingres experience got me a Sybase database developer job</li>
<li>Sybase developer job got me a PowerBuilder job</li>
<li>Powerbuilder/Sybase jobs got me a Microsoft SQL Server job</li>
<li>Used all previous work to move into data warehousing and Oracle work</li>
<li>Milked 10 more years of Oracle work…until NSA decided to throw Oracle out</li>
<li>In process of switching to big data, Hadoop and all that mess.</li>
<li>On year 23 of being a software engineer</li>
</ul>
<p>In addition to:
Maximizing the “non-degree graduate student” status to get admitted to a graduate engineering program WITHOUT taking a GRE and earning a M.S. in Engineering from the University of Wisconsin System.</p>
<p>I live in Alberta, so don’t you dare make claims about ECE’s being heavily in demand in Alberta/BC that you can’t back up BEngineer. Things are so bad in Alberta for ECE’s that it took some of the engineers laid off from the Nortel factory 3-4 years to find replacement employment (and not even in the ECE field…). And ECE grads are working as Shaw cable installers because they can’t find anything else. </p>
<p>Alberta’s primary area of engineering demand is in the fields that are directly applicable to oil and gas. And various instrumentation techs, and such. Very little EE/ECE demand in the whole scheme of things. Again, I live there, so don’t you try and snow us with claims that everyone’s easily finding employment and jobs are abundant.</p>
<p>I also have 3 friends with PhD EE, 2 from UAlberta, one from another well known university. In the Photonics/materials area of ECE. 2 are unemployed, the other could only find a job in construction project management. There is very minimal demand for this type of engineering or even ECE in general in Alberta.</p>
<p>Indeed bschoolwhiz, in Canada (and probably in the US as well), typically only 1/3rd engineers are actually employed post-graduation in jobs that allow them to write the P.E. exam (P.Eng. in Canada), and register for the P.E. I hear similar numbers in the USA with the broader community of “STEM” grads, only about 1/3rd are employed in STEM professions. </p>
<p>Of course, this is really depressing, so they don’t really tell you about it in school. But certainly there’s a story behind each and every person who has been disenfranchised from the career and profession they studied for. Often without even so much as being able to get their foot in the door for their first job, as is the case with a heck of a lot of ECE’s in Canada, particularly out west here. Even pretty basic entry-level jobs in telecom are receiving 100+ resumes. I know this because I make the point of tracking down the HR clerk who collects them all for every job I apply to, and actually talking to them.</p>
<p>if you think that the market is bad, then its bad. I just speak on behalf of my experience and my bachelors in ee has given me plenty of opportunities thus far of which getting this degree is one of the best choices that I have made.</p>
<p>You and I may have had different experiences, of which this may lead you to this view on the Alberta job market.</p>
<p>On a side note: getting a PEng in most companies would not directly lead to a salary bump, so some people did not go to take the nppe even if they can.</p>
<p>I’m not involved in a technical or science focused career, but I emphatically agree with GlobalTraveler when he/she says that you’ve got to be creative to find more than one way to get to where you want to go. In any field or career you’re always going to find the pessimist of that old farmer’s joke who said “You can’t get there from here.” Lake Jr. is heading into his second year at Engineering School, and the lesson to be repeated is be earnest, honest, creative, diligent and assertive to find a way to get what you want.</p>