My husband is a career engineer…and he eventually did project management. He says…it is his opinion that getting real engineering design under your belt first…as part of a team…is key. A newly minted grad doesn’t have the engineering experience to manage a team that could be engineers from multiple disciplines, plus many many others.
I will keep my fingers crossed that your engineer will find a mech E job when he graduates. The key…he might need to be flexible in terms of location and also the type of companies.
@momofboiler1 - I’ll PM you when I’m on a real computer (I stink at phone typing). Thank you! Yes, it may be in the wrong areas, but who knows.
@blossom - yes, I think that was me. He already had a year long research project lined up for his senior year. He and two other students are working with the head of the MechE Department on a project they designed and that he’s sponsoring. This should give him a good bit of experience and will hopefully help. He’s also planning to talk with professors to see if they have suggestions.
@thumper - yes, this is what he’s been thinking. Better to get the actual engineering job first. The company he was at last summer - mostly on the supply chain team for a group building a new reactor - told him they’d extend him an offer, but it was for management work, which he doesn’t want. He’s talking with them about whether there would be any MechE jobs available instead, which I think there might be… he just needs to decide that he’s not going to stay in New England.
Agree 100%. D19 spent a year being a barista until a “proper” job came along. A friend’s son has spent the last year playing video games or something waiting for a job he considers worthy of his degree. Being a barista may not have been intellectually stimulating, but D19 learnt a lot about herself, service jobs, and people all while fully supporting herself.
If a person gets a PhD in soil ecology, their expectation is that they will get a job in farm country. That is where the vast majority of academic departments of natural resources (depending on their names) are, as well as the vast majority of federal jobs that require a PhD.
She cannot get a job because universities cannot hire now, and because the federal jobs have all been slashed. What happened to the academic and federal workforce is unprecedented and nobody could have predicted this.
As for Ranting Nobucks there, he has never worked outside of an air-conditioned office in his life - he is a “video producer” and “media activist”, meaning somebody who talks a lot but never actually does anything.
It would be fun to do a reality show where you have Roddy Starbuck try to survive working an oil rig job or mining job for 9 hours.
Also, many people really have no idea what the job market is for person with a PhD. So they should think twice or more before they criticize this woman based on their limited understanding of her opportunities and, to be entirely frank, her qualifications.
First, there are a very large number of jobs who will not hire you because you are qualified, or they think that you are not qualified. Others won’t because they think that you are overqualified.
She is also suffering from an issue that many graduates suffer from, namely, the fact that her mentors likely hammered into her that she is only qualified for academic jobs. So she is unaware of the fact that there are many jobs that she can apply for, and which will be happy to hire her. Since she did her PhD at a top program, they likely hammered into her that, unless she gets an academic job, she’s a failure.
It is also very likely the reason that jobs for which she is qualified are turning her down because because her resume is written like an academic CV. This can make it difficult to get an interview for a non-academic job. For example a major issue of people doing their PhDs is that, even though they are expected to have a large number of hard and soft skills, these all are taken for granted. Therefore they do not include these skills on an academic CV. So academics trying to transition to non-academic jobs do not put these skills in their resume either. What that means is that these ex-academics are not writing resumes that highlight the very skills that will help them get a job.
She needs a mentor for her non-academic job search. I know, because I’ve been through that.
saying it plans to cut entry-level hiring in the US by almost a third over the next three years.
The company did not comment on specific numbers but said the reductions reflected “the rapid pace of technological change is reshaping how we work” and “historically low” attrition.
My s’s are both engineers. While neither of course started out as a project or program manager and neither stayed with the first employer that hired them, within a few years after graduation both became program (not project) managers. They are now both senior technical program managers. It is doable (if that’s what he wants), though hard to say if thats still true in the current employment environment. But don’t give up!
I’m not even suggesting he take a non-related Engineering job, but he majored in a really niche field, architectural engineering, and the building industry is currently dead. He has expanded his scope a bit by also applying to project management roles, but I think he needs to broaden the scope even more. Still there’s a big gulf between Engineering adjacent and working at Home Depot. The longer his search takes though the more difficult it’s going to become. His Dad is going to try reaching out to some of his business contacts to see if he can help with networking. Hopefully something will materialize for him soon.
This is also something so hard for students to figure out. Sometimes they are told they should be in a niche to stand out, sometimes that they have to be more general to maximize job opportunities. (And somewhere in that they should be studying what they actually want to, of course.) And no-one actually knows what the jobs market is going to be like when you graduate 4 years later.
I had this worry for ds too. He too really enjoys the hands on work. When he took the job he has now it was with the thought that something was better than nothing, but the concern was whether or not he’d be able to eventually transition into the type of work he really wanted to be doing or if this role would end up shutting that door.
Well in turns out that this company has it’s fingers in many pies. It’s a really small company though with about only 10 employees, so ds has already been asked to help out in other areas beyond what he was initially hired to do. Areas that are directly related to what he wants to be doing. I don’t think he’d have gotten the opportunities he’s currently getting if he’d been hired at a larger company.
This is a good point that I hadn’t thought of. At the (very large) company he worked for during his internship he didn’t get to do anything other than the management stuff. But it makes sense that with a smaller company people chip in and slide between roles more on an as needed basis.
Oh, but I think this is also one of those things that is so variable by company. Some big companies are very rigid in roles and structure and others are really good at internally advertising opportunities and encouraging employees to move to where they really want to be. It can also depend on the department you’re in within that company. Some small companies offer opportunities as above for different exposures and experiences, and others are just too small to offer anything other than what you’ve been hired into. It’s one of those things that you probably don’t really know until you’re there (assuming you don’t want to ask “how easy is it for me to leave this job for something I want to do more” in the job interview!!)
Not sure where you’re looking, but were you looking for structural civil engineers or all civil engineering jobs? Because I don’t see any architectural eng getting a position as a civil outside of structures/bridge design.
That being said, I looked up a couple of prefab pedestrian walking bridge companies and some of them had positions open for structural engineers. I think something like that could work. Many of those bridges are cool (to me)
I think AI has been overplayed and stagnation underplayed, including “historically low” attrition. Companies are being cautious, and so are people: they aren’t changing jobs, moving, or retiring. There is so much economic uncertainty, most are wary of change.
Agree that the more “hands on” opportunities are at the smaller companies. That was clearly true for older s’s experiences. The good news is he had lots of great hand’s on experience, but some of the smaller companies did not have job stability.
Has the architectural engineering major looked at firms working on existing buildings rather than new design? My D is in this field (forensics) and there’s hiring happening. She’s very busy at work and being recruited by other firms. Her firm is trying to hire. She is several years out of college, has an architectural engineering bachelor’s, structural master’s and has plenty of work doing condition assessments, historical preservation, repair design.
