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andryd9
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Wonder what some of you with experience think of this article, as much of it contradicts what I've been told: is the job market for engineers hard or soft?
Aero51 said:This makes me feel like I should have just quit school and became a janitor or a mechanic...or a garbage man! I still can't find a job after 6 months of searching.
andryd9 said:How specific do your skills have to be before an employer takes a chance with you (that with the plus of a proven track record?)
andryd9 said:And if the current skills aren't desirable enough to pay for in terms of salaries that reward the existing labor for keeping skills current, or in terms of compensation for retraining, how can they be truly in demand? Those two realities don't mesh well together.
ModusPwnd said:In my experience, they need to be very specific.
In many cases this means the workers aren't nearly as skilled and in demand as they think they are. This is where long term unemployment comes from. I don't think I am seeing the discrepancy here...
What companies need (what I have gleaned they need from job postings) is very specific skills and low expectation of pay. US grads often have broad academic knowledge and high expectations of pay. This is why they need/want foreign workers. There will never be any reason for them to say stop importing potential employees or stop pushing for more graduates; the bigger the pool of applicants for them the better.
Aero51 said:This makes me feel like I should have just quit school and became a janitor or a mechanic...or a garbage man! I still can't find a job after 6 months of searching.
Aero51 said:I don't have the money to move and I only speak English. So I don't think I could, though I've thought about it.
andModusPwnd said:But I know that I don't really have any marketable skills and that is what companies need. If they can't get skilled labor from me and my fellow grads, they will get it elsewhere.
There is something fundamentally wrong here!Silicon Valley companies, warning of an acute labor shortage, say it is too costly to retrain older workers like Mr. Doernberg, and that the country is not producing enough younger Americans with the precise skills the industry needs.
It that is what the 'tech' industry is doing, then that is immoral and unethical in my opinion.But Americans like Mr. Doernberg and the powerful labor lobby say that what the tech industry really wants is to depress wages and bring in more pliant, less costly temporary workers from overseas.
Astronuc said:Personally, I've had experience with undergraduates who cannot write properly (I've experienced college graduates barely writing, in some cases unable to write, at a 10th grade level)...
Astronuc said:How is it that an undergraduate can graduate without marketable skills?!
StatGuy2000 said:Have you thought of leaving the US and seeking work elsewhere? Say, to Canada, Australia, or even to Asian countries like Singapore.
ModusPwnd said:I've looked into Canada. I concluded its not much of an option. They really only want people who are rich, oppressed/refugees or skilled. A college grad is usually none of these things. They will not take an unemployed college grad as a skilled labor immigrant.
I always assumed that moving to a developing country, like somewhere in Latin America, would be easier. But that is not something I have looked into.
StatGuy2000 said:If you can't afford to get a second degree, why not seek further training through a community college in areas something employable e.g. mechanic, plumber, electrician, tool-and-dye-maker, etc.
In Canada there is a shortage of workers in the areas I just described (in fact, I have read reports that up to 40% of all new jobs being generated fall into the skilled workers category). There is an especially critical shortage of skilled workers in the province of Alberta, due largely to the booming oil industry.
I think this is a little hard to sell. How can you convince a potential employer that you actually know as much/can do the same job as a statistician or programmer without the proper degree or even relevant coursework? Just saying: I studied these introductory books and programmed such and such, cross my heart? We still have to get through the HR filters to get called into an interview to prove yourself, not having the degree they ask for already puts one at a major disadvantage.StatGuy2000 said:Another option is to do what ParticleGrl had done and spend some time retraining yourself in statistics/data mining or programming (maybe contribute to open source projects). Those skills you develop yourself can be considered "marketable" skills, and with networking it would give you at least a shot at something different. After all, if you have time posting here at PhysicsForums, you have time to retrain yourself.
Lavabug said:I think this is a little hard to sell. How can you convince a potential employer that you actually know as much/can do the same job as a statistician or programmer without the proper degree or even relevant coursework? Just saying: I studied these introductory books and programmed such and such, cross my heart? We still have to get through the HR filters to get called into an interview to prove yourself, not having the degree they ask for already puts one at a major disadvantage.
Yes, it's tough for a physics major is going to compete with a computer science major for a programming job where the product is a compiler or a database. So don't pursue those jobs. There are *lots* of jobs where programming is a required but nonetheless secondary skill. Of greater importance are the skills you learned as a physics major.Lavabug said:I think this is a little hard to sell. How can you convince a potential employer that you actually know as much/can do the same job as a statistician or programmer without the proper degree or even relevant coursework?
D H said:Suppose that some physics major used as many of liberal arts electives as possible studying classical languages, as many technical electives as possible studying number theory. Why do people do this to themselves? There's not one marketable skill here. The "real world" does not owe people a job.
How can you convince a potential employer that you actually know as much/can do the same job as a statistician or programmer without the proper degree or even relevant coursework?
D H said:Suppose that some physics major used as many of liberal arts electives as possible studying classical languages, as many technical electives as possible studying number theory. Why do people do this to themselves? There's not one marketable skill here. The "real world" does not owe people a job.
Lavabug said:I've never heard of a physics major taking electives even remotely similar to those.
carlgrace said:There is some truth to a skills shortage, but the companies are largely being disingenuous. Certain narrow subfields are very hot and salaries are increasing, but even then, there is rampant age-bias and an unwillingness to train your workforce. If you can "hit the ground running" in a needed skills area, you can write your own ticket, provided you're under 50. If you're over 50 and you're looking for a technical job, you have an uphill battle ahead of you.
I have a friend who graduated from the same lab I did (he was my TA and an older student at the time) who was laid off six months ago and hasn't found work. He's in his late 50s and we are both trained in what is currently a sizzling technical area. I get recruiting calls and email from the likes of Intel and Apple a few times a month, and he can't get an interview. It's wrong. I think we should address this age bias problem before we start bringing in more foreign workers. There is also this bizarre bias out there in favor of people who already have jobs, but that might be another issue entirely.
kinkmode said:I was a physics major. I was also a philosophy minor, so guilty as charged :) (It might be a US thing though). However, I also took a lot of math and some programming, and have developed plenty of technical skills on the side in the last decade and a half.
Regardless, I get sick of the attitude that 'physics majors expect a job to be handed to them'. That description doesn't remotely describe my situation. B.A. in Physics, Ph.D. in Physics, 5 years of experience running a research lab, writing proposals, training workers, programming, performing data analysis, given presentations, reviewing DOE proposals and scientific articles, etc. Yet that attitude is the default one that is applied anytime I meet someone in industry.
It gets REAL tiring hearing some engineer tell me that I have no real world skills when they can't add a macro in Excel or figure out that they tripped a breaker in the lunch room because the overloaded the circuit with 6 kW of appliances. It gets REAL tiring when the nice little HR ladies tell you their company can't hire you because you "don't have a degree in science; you have a Bachelor of ARTS".
I'm not trying to compete with a mechanical engineer who wants to calculate stresses on a girder or a programmer who wants to write apps for an iPhone. There are plenty of interdisciplinary roles which I have a lot of real world experience excelling at, but am not given a chance because of the attitude of "you have no real world skills."
I can throw an anecdote here. My brother is in sales at a big telecom corp in the US and has been in charge of hiring people. He told me he discriminates against older workers but the best argument I managed to coax out of him in support of that was that they're more "set in their ways", and that "younger people are more willing to learn new things", but I'm sure those ideas are not his own, since our father made a huge career change in his 50's before he died and managed to support a family with 4, even after having recently having emigrated to another country. He knows the kind of poor work ethic and entitlement issues some fresh engineering grads he's come across have, so I doubt he really believes the 2nd argument either.StatGuy2000 said:(4) Particularly in technical fields, many of the hiring managers may themselves be relatively young, and so they may feel discomfort in hiring older workers.
StatGuy2000 said:My question to you is the following: why do you state in your resume that you have a BA in physics? Here, in this situation, simply stretching the truth and stating that you have a BS in physics (or even simply dropping all reference about having a BA, and just state you have a PhD in physics) should help you overcome the HR problem of being "filtered" out of science jobs.
StatGuy2000 said:Or you can contact recruiters for technical positions of interest to you. LinkedIn also provides networking opportunities that will be of value to you.
StatGuy2000 said:The age bias is real, and there is a certain logic in why employers may be biased against older workers. I can think of several reasons why employers may be unwilling to hire older workers:
(1) Older workers may expect to receive higher salaries than what many companies are willing to pay.
(2) Older workers may, on average, be more likely to utilize health care than younger workers, and therefore health insurance may be more costly for employers who hire older workers.
(3) There may be a perception that older workers may not have the latest skills available, or may be be "slower" at picking up new skills than younger skills.
(4) Particularly in technical fields, many of the hiring managers may themselves be relatively young, and so they may feel discomfort in hiring older workers.
(5) There may be a perception that since older workers will likely be retiring in a short period of time, it may not be worth it for companies to invest in them.
I'm not justifying age discrimination -- I'm just stating the facts. Therefore older workers will have to put that much more effort in overcoming these barriers.
carlgrace said:This subject frustrates me. As a society we claim we want to encourage young people to pursue STEM careers, but our actions speak louder than words.
kinkmode said:A) it would be lying. Besides, I've got a Ph.D., you think that would qualify for a degree in science. And more importantly, B) it was basically the HR lady's ignorant parsing the company wide rule of "We only hire engineering degrees."
You might think that the managers might care more than the HR people, but in that situation, it wasn't true. The above example of the 'not having a science degree' conversation occurred two months into a contract job. It's not as if my resume wasn't making it through the HR filter. What WAS going on was that the situation was misrepresented to me in the interview (you could always get hired here permanently) when the reality of it was that was not an option. The managers of that project were either on vacation, or literally sat around all day doing nothing. Some days they'd say they were coming onsite, and they just wouldn't show. One retired halfway through the project. These are not the kind of people who recognize talent and motivation and are willing to buck the system to get you in. They were the kind of people who do as little work as possible while they rake in their $150-200k salaries.
As to resume drafting and LinkedIn: I do and I do. I'm not just randomly firing resumes out into the void. I'm networking, setting up informational interviews, etc. I'm even getting my foot in the door, as above, however little good that is doing.
I know my worth. I know I can do many jobs. Companies are simply not willing to take a chance on someone without 5 years of INDUSTRY experience where I live. They'd much rather hire someone who has 'experience' and does a mediocre job than someone like me. Any larger technical company would rather hire an engineer from a crappy school, who will do nothing but sit in a cubicle being mediocre, than 'take a chance' on someone who has proven their worth in difficult fields for years. No matter how you recast your experience, at some point in the process, they turn their noses up at you because you don't have INDUSTRY experience.
kinkmode said:I think this is where the lie is. Society doesn't want STEM people. Society wants cheap IT.