Also, and I don’t know if it requires an engineer, but as workers are going back into offices, they are having to be re designed.
In Nashville, there is so much new building, new highway off ramps, a new airport terminal…I don’t know the areas of interest - but stadiums, airports, infrastructure projects are all in full swing…not to mention, here for example, Oracle is moving the HQ and that’s all new. In W Texas, stopped til 2027 but Ford is building a new plant.
Seems there is a lot of building and modernizing taking place although I don’t know OPs interests and/or geographic limitations.
I put into indeed Architectual Engineer entry level - over 1000 jobs show - not all with the stubject - but OP might find things there. i’m on the phone app - so they don’t show when listed - I always choose last week or two…but it might be another avenue for OP to find some listings.
I feel for these kids.
With only 30 schools being ABET accredited, assuming OP was at one, I’d hope they’d have listings of who hires these kids…it’s a hard time, but these kids have to keep going (amongst all the rejection).
The students here are apprentices with United Association Local 342, a union that trains and represents workers in the pipe trades industries. They’ll complete a five-year paid apprenticeship to graduate as journeymen — and expect to earn a union wage of $80.50 an hour. Trainees cite a desire to work with their hands and the competitive pay as reasons for pursuing a career in the skilled trades. But young adults entering the workforce are facing a new challenge that is increasing the attractiveness of blue-collar jobs: the rapid development of artificial intelligence.
Data from the Federal Reserve shows that among recent college graduates, the unemployment rates for majors once heralded as tickets to high-salary, high-status jobs like computer engineering and computer science were 7.5% and 6.1%, respectively. In contrast, construction services majors’ unemployment rate was just 0.7%.
(Mentions some surveys about people choosing blue collar work because more protected from Ai)
…
But trade work has appeals far beyond being a safe haven from AI. Graduates from apprenticeships or community college programs enter the workforce with a fraction of the debt of a four-year college degree, or no debt at all. And most skilled industry jobs are represented by unions that guarantee medical benefits and competitive salaries.
…
Trade jobs have also become popular among those with bachelor’s degrees. The Resume Builder survey found that 37% of Gen Z adults working in blue-collar fields had four-year degrees.
While it is not hard to find areas where the job market is always difficult for job seekers (e.g. arts, biology), those which are “good” are only good sometimes, depending on economic and industry cycles that cannot reliably be predicted four years in advance. What may be good now may see an industry downtown four years from now.
Niche fields are very vulnerable to industry downturns. Those niche majors that do not give much hiring advantage in their target niche jobs (when not in a downturn) have questionable value versus more general majors that are similarly hireable in the niche jobs but more hireable outside the niche.
We’re in Canada, so not ABET, but yes accredited. Most Engineering programs here are accredited. This also explains part of the reason why he’s having such a hard time finding a job. Our economic climate is very different, especially for youth/new grads. His brother currently works and lives in the US. I’m not sure if he’s considering doing the same.
For reference, the student in question graduated from the University of Waterloo. The Engineering students have an unofficial motto of “Cali or Bust”, and almost everyone is chasing 6 figure starting salaries.
Everyone can’t start at the top. My daughter is in traffic engineering and many of her early days were spent counting car. Literally counting cars go by certain intersections. Not exciting and she didn’t make 6 (American dollar) figures. Now, 7 years later, she does.
My Son in Law just changed jobs. He’s in construction management, and has one more semester till he gets a masters in it. He’s also up for another job that would pay a lot more. It is is a Godforsaken part of Texas, not by beautiful California beaches or majestic mountains, just dust and cows and tumbleweeds.
Years ago I knew a guy who had been a city planner. He said the problem with it as a career is that you are almost always in the middle of nowhere, ‘planning’ a city, and that by the time it is planned and built, you are long gone and have to move to the next place that needs planning. Civil engineers also spend a lot of time in the ‘pre-improved’ parts of cities, counting cars, walking through dirt mounds that will be highway ramps, going to town meetings in school gyms.
I like counting cars! I’d still do it if they’d let me. My first day interning? I literally made copies of plan sheets all day long. Back then, the large format copier could only make one copy of one sheet at a time. 8 copies of a 100+ page set of plans. It was feed one sheet in, grab and stack the copy, feed the next one in, grab and stack… rinse and repeat for 8 hours.
Weirder one that wouldn’t be done nowadays. I used a wheel to measure the distance of every mile marker sign to the nearest bridge or overhead sign along I81 (both directions) between Lexington, VA and Harrisonburg, VA. My coworker was pregnant so I wouldn’t let her walk on the shoulder. She shadowed me in the van. Why? It was for a study and we had accident reports. The locations were based off the mile marker signs, so we needed to know where they were. Life is so much easier now!!!
I think most engineers would rather walk in the dirt mounds that do the public hearings! Unless you get lucky and nobody shows up
My daughter has to do the public hearings all the time. She hates them not because they are boring (oh are they boring) but because they are at night, often about 2 hours from home, and she goes to bed kind of early so they throw her schedule off.
If they are successfully placing half their graduates in 6 figure salary positions, then they have the right (IMO) to continue that culture. If not, they are no different than a football team shouting “We’re #1” after a single victory in week one of the season.
And they should encourage grads to be realistic and not hold out for that perfect job in Silicon Valley.
The last chart in the above linked page shows that the percentage of unemployed who are new entrants to the job market rose sharply in the last month. It was around 10% until June 2025, but rose to 13% in July 2025.
I haven’t believed the rosy job picture for a while now. They’ve revised sharply downwards several times and it doesn’t square with what I’m seeing in real life (not that my anecdotes are a replacement for data).
Some interesting data to unpack in that study. It really speaks to the importance for young people of choosing job sectors that are less vulnerable to complete AI automation and to become skilled in using AI to augment their work. Many of the remaining roles are not necessarily going to require a college education though which may accelerate the recently observed decline in the rate of college attendance by high school graduates.
Older workers are not seeing similar levels of impact at least for now and it may be that older workers retire out of the system before the impacts become overly wide spread. The big question is whether the impacts will start to be felt more for mid-career workers as the pace of AI adoption increases or if the increase in AI adoption makes mid-career workers the most sheltered.
In any case it seems like this spells out a potential scenario where lower to medium skilled white collar and service jobs are eliminated and the surviving jobs become very bimodal with those in the highly skilled (and paid) professions and trades on the one hand and in the lower skilled (and lower paid) helping roles like PSWs and Nursing Aids on the other, surviving. It could result in the further hollowing out of the middle class that began with the offshoring of manufacturing if new medium skilled roles don’t arise to replace those that are being eliminated.
If that’s the case it has some concerning societal implications as a very broad swath of the population basically becomes unemployed.
All these companies that believe they don’t need to invest in hiring and training new graduates because AI and experienced employees provide more value - what will they do in 15–20 years when those seasoned employees retire? Where will the next generation of ‘experienced employees’ come from?
Yes, some new grads will start their own businesses, and some other grads will work for them. But there will also be a lot of other grads who will be under-/un-employed and that will lead to a deficit of experienced talent 10, 15, 20 years from now.
I’ve been wondering about this too. I came across an article that said employment for 27–32 year olds with experience has remained steady — they’re still being hired and retained. That suggests companies clearly value the mix of education and 5–10 years of post-grad experience.
But if new graduates aren’t being hired today, how does the talent pipeline continue into that experienced workforce down the line?
I’m not buying this study as much. First they start measuring from 2022 which was at the near top of the massive zirp hiring spree and then there were multiple tax related issues in tech plus a rapid hike in interest rates. and then gpt publicly came out with very basic models only in nov 2022. and then there is the effect of tariffs and broader econ slowdown. finally, if you are going to show the dropoff from 2022-2025 you also should have a run up from 2019 and not just start from 2021. so is hiring merely returning to historical baselines after a period of peak growth drunk on cheap money? or is the bottom really falling off?
sure i agree that new grad hiring is slowing but im not yet buying that it’s mainly AI driven.