New grad engineer

[johndoe9]

What are some good post grad options for engineering graduates?

[Kalimoor]

What are your school and specialty?

[tjayl]

What are some good post grad options for engineering graduates?

Find a job in your discipline. With the detail you have given that's about the detail needed in a response.

[Mark77]

What are some good post grad options for engineering graduates?

Try and find a job. If you don't in a few months, basically, either go to grad school or find something else to do. There's a massive glut of engineers across most disciplines these days, especially with oil and gas dramatically throttling back in Western Canada, and Civil cranking out large numbers of people.

[Engi-Nir]

Good luck with job search.... Every company is in need of engineers but the catch is minimum 5yrs

[Mark77]

Good luck with job search.... Every company is in need of engineers but the catch is minimum 5yrs

I wonder if its about technical skills, or if its really about employers wanting more 'mature' employees? ie: a guy with a kid and a wife/mortgage, is a heck of a lot less likely to rock the boat and job hop, than a newly minted EIT hired at some bottom-of-the-barrel salary?

Anyone? I know for the government employers of engineers I'm familiar with, they'd rather hire the worst quality/dumbest engineer with 5 years of experience to do a relatively mundane/routine job, than a top quality engineer with less 'experience'.

[spike1128]

I wonder if its about technical skills, or if its really about employers wanting more 'mature' employees? ie: a guy with a kid and a wife/mortgage, is a heck of a lot less likely to rock the boat and job hop, than a newly minted EIT hired at some bottom-of-the-barrel salary?

Anyone? I know for the government employers of engineers I'm familiar with, they'd rather hire the worst quality/dumbest engineer with 5 years of experience to do a relatively mundane/routine job, than a top quality engineer with less 'experience'.

Mark. I think employers would rather hire a poor guy with wife and kids to feed. Then he has no choice but to work like slave. I notice that in the field. Rich guys who are living off parents/inheritance are less likely to work hard.

[johndoe9]

Good luck with job search.... Every company is in need of engineers but the catch is minimum 5yrs

so how the hell are new grads supposed to find a job?

[Mark77]

so how the hell are new grads supposed to find a job?

In the out-of-favour fields, most of them don't. Also Canada is a destination for a large number of foreign trained engineers, often with some overseas experience in state-owned industries, for which working at a mere EIT entry level salary is like a King's ransom instead of the sort of grumbles received from Canadian grads when they're offered $45-$50k/year.

[oajlu]

If you are highly skilled computer/Electrical engineer, you should check out silicon valley. Tier 1 company there pays entry level engineers 80-90k salary, and opportunity is a lot better there.
Of course, it's a lot easier if you have connection which may land you an interview. However, if you aren't highly skilled, they wouldn't hire you anyway.

[MoonDoggy]

If you are highly skilled computer/Electrical engineer, you should check out silicon valley. Tier 1 company there pays entry level engineers 80-90k salary, and opportunity is a lot better there.
Of course, it's a lot easier if you have connection which may land you an interview. However, if you aren't highly skilled, they wouldn't hire you anyway.

Those were the days before the economy tanked, you could have gotten jobs that pays like that on entry level. Those jobs were also the first ones to get cut. Now you're competing against more experienced guys for the same job with lower pay.

[Mark77]

If you are highly skilled computer/Electrical engineer, you should check out silicon valley. Tier 1 company there pays entry level engineers 80-90k salary, and opportunity is a lot better there.

Except hiring is quite rare, especially of Canadians down there. We're talking about companies that get a thousand applications and only hire one person. Not easy, even for the 'highly skilled'. Its worth a shot, of course, but its typically a long shot.

Of course, it's a lot easier if you have connection which may land you an interview. However, if you aren't highly skilled, they wouldn't hire you anyway.

I agree with the first part of your comment, but you'd be surprised -- getting the interview is 99% of the battle because of the sheer number of applications those firms receive. They're often willing to overlook skills once you do get an interview. And really, going through an engineering program in Canada is pretty much a guarantee of skills -- the rest is on-the-job training and personal development.

[Mark77]

Those were the days before the economy tanked, you could have gotten jobs that pays like that on entry level. Those jobs were also the first ones to get cut. Now you're competing against more experienced guys for the same job with lower pay.

Yeah Silicon Valley hasn't been hospitable to new grad engineers for at least a decade now. The firms down there, in the wake of the 2001 crash, re-hired their existing alumni (if they were young and useful), and mostly completed the balance of their staffing requirements by hiring foreigners on the H-1B visa program (usually from India/Asia), rather than tapping the domestic talent pool.

The "Computer/Electrical Engineering" side of the industry has also been hit extremely hard as Silicon Valley has moved almost completely away from anything to do with hardware, mostly to software development. Computer Science grads have fared significantly better relatively speaking.

[Mars2012]

My husband hired an electrical engineer just this month. There are jobs available, but you have to have the required education and relative experience. Keep in mind that job postings describes the ideal candidate. Quite often, nobody meets the requirements, so you select the most-nearly qualified. He doesn't consider whether the person is just out of school, or is a family man with mouths to feed - it's strictly the most qualified. And he certainly wouldn't hire the dumbest engineer (as Mark says is industry norm), it would make his job more difficult if he had incompetent or unreliable staff.

[lexar123]

My company hires new grads all the time.
The problem is that candidates have no marketable skills when they complete an engineering degree without some extra curricular efforts outside of pure class work. Unless I am willing to invest considerably I prefer that they come out of school with some base skills.

The ones I hire have either had summer job or worked on class projects or other ways of aquiring some unix, IP networking, database, java, troubleshooting skills, etc...
I don't expect experts but enough basic knowledge that they are not starting from zero!

Of course the non technical skills are just as important. They have to have social and communication skills, strong work ethics, motivation and enthusiasm.