Yes I hope anyone searching now is not taking the situation as an indictment. I remember when i was in B school when the job market for Investment Banking and MBB literally went to zero. Some of the smartest kids didn’t land anything. Many who wanted McKinsey instead “settled for Amazon” circa 2009. Another one deferred graduation by a year.
In hindsight the guys who ended up at Amazon had $120k stock grant when it was trading at 80 a share before the run to 3000. Everyone who went there made $10M+ over the next decade - so much better than the lucky few who went to McKinsey and Bain. Someone was worried about joining a boring firm called NVIDIA and guess what he is now retired.
Oh and the guy who deferred graduation by a year ended up at BCG when the market recovered and now is a senior exec at Microsoft.
My point is that life whether personal or professional is not linear. The superpower for our kids is the time they have ahead of them and the fact that they are close to the starting line. It’s important to keep building skills and acquire experiences that are consistent with their career aspirations. Even if things don’t pan out in the short term, there are ways to reset careers.
As a parent I told my kid to swing for the fences and not compromise on getting the right job even if it means risking being unemployed. Of course this is not a practical approach for many people but it was the only thing i could do at the outset to get him to focus on a handful of compelling opportunities.
Good luck to everyone. This is indeed a sobering thread and i have a feeling things will get far worse before it’s going to get better.
One of the reasons our son got his job after he graduated two years ago, over other candidates, was that he presented ideas for using AI in several of their workflows. He half-joked the other day that I helped introduce AI to the company and that I will probably, at some point, be replaced by it. I don’t like being a pessimist, but you have to be a realist about its impact on the job market.
Instead of quibbling on info published all over, the point was not all engineers end up in engineering jobs. OP mentioned supply chain was offered which makes sense because, and I don’t know what, a lot of supply chain job listings ask for MechEs. I understand why they’d ask for IEs.
It was simply a comment when the parent stated their student wasn’t returning to an offered internship bcuz the job wasn’t engineering. As the data shows, that’s more common than not. My son experienced it himself when he did return.
Many apparently like how engineers think. And in reality, even if you are hired in as an engineer, it doesn’t mean your duties won’t change if you won’t be transferred to a non engineering role.
The original source appears to be Where do college graduates work? , which mentions that it is “for respondents aged 25 to 64 who have completed a bachelor’s or higher degree.” I.e. not just recent graduates, but includes those who have been in their careers longer term.
New graduates are probably more likely to work in engineering than those further in their careers, who may have moved into management or other jobs.
Also note that the above indicates that a significant percentage of engineering graduates work in computing jobs, which are listed separately from engineering jobs. About half of the engineering graduates were working in engineering or computing. The next largest group of engineering graduates was in management jobs (not generally considered new college graduate jobs).
You know that earlier post where I said to move on? It wasn’t a suggestion. Move on.
If you’re wondering if I’m talking about you, then yes, I probably am. Can we please get past debating minutiae?!?! CC is not a debate society. Thank you.
You know what the best part of my Thanksgiving was? (Thanksgiving kind of stunk - my kids didn’t come home, my sister and her family weren’t there, my aunts and uncles that we used to see now have too many kids-with-spouse and grandkids so they don’t come anymore so it was really small.) The best part was that with the super small group, not one person asked what my kid was planning to do after graduation!
This is in stark contrast to the last large family meal with many many relatives, which happened to be Christmas that my younger son (S25) was a senior in high school. The highlight of that meal was my favorite uncle, who has no insight into this at all (of my generation I’m the oldest, with the oldest kids) who announced “S25 is applying to Clemson? Why Clemson? I thought he was a smart kid!”
Thanks uncle. Said kid is now at Clemson… and loving it.
So maybe I need to be prepping my college senior kid with a version of the “how to respond to well meaning but poorly informed family and friends” talk we had to do around college applications (his cranky highlight of college application season was “Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is that some kind of trade school?”) but focused on job stuff…
[End attempt to shift conversation. I’ve got nothing else even vaguely Job Prospect’y to relate…]
I do think it’s worth noting that grad school is a tried and true method for waiting out a jobcession, too. There is a reason that postsecondary education, and perhaps especially posttertiary education, is to some extent economically countercyclical.
(Not that my kid who graduates from college this coming May is even remotely willing to consider it, but still.)
@OctoberKate there have been two previous threads about how to respond to people whe ask foolish questions or make ignorant comments about college choices ! Here’s one of them
I don’t know if they’re hiring entry but any grad or planning to graduate should keep an eye on Stellantis. Hiring plans updated today from the other week.
“Stellantis has taken decisive actions over the past several months to accelerate growth in North America, which will support a stronger company globally,” spokeswoman Jodi Tinson told Automotive News affiliate Crain’s Detroit Business in an email. “In addition to making a $13 billion investment in our U.S. operations over the next four years that will create 5,000 new manufacturing jobs and bringing back products that customers love … we are adding nearly 2,000 jobs in critical areas — including manufacturing, quality and engineering — to further drive an improved customer experience with our company.
Just a year ago, the situation at the carmaker, and its future in Michigan, appeared dire — so much so that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called it a “top priority” to retain the automaker’s Michigan presence as its nerve center shifted overseas under previous leadership.
Ex-CEO Carlos Tavares cut to the bone, slashing global employee count by 50,000 between 2020, just before the FCA-Groupe PSA merger created Stellantis, and the end of 2024. All the while, metro Detroit employee ranks were being whittled down.
For the first time in years, the automaker is adding white-collar employees in North America rather than conducting layoffs or buyouts. The company declined to say how many of the nearly 2,000 new employees have already been hired and how many roles it is still working to fill.“
I haven’t followed along in this topic for long, but it sure seems pigeonholed. What percentage of grads don’t do engineering, IB, PE and VC? Did I miss the accounting posts? How about Poli Sci grads? At this point it’s essentially worthless to 90% of college grads.
I agree with @tsbna44, get a job of some sort, a gap in employment is a red flag to me.
Here’s an idea, law enforcement is always hiring and they’ll take any degree. They pay MORE if you have a degree.
I believe this was already suggested somewhere up thread, as well as other first responder type work. The thread has been going a while…
Edit: you mentioned this in post #246, after publisher mentioned police jobs in #239/#241. It was brought up again by others in #409 and #420. Easy to lose when we now have gone over 1500 posts here!
I’m more than happy to commiserate with other people with students in areas different from ours looking for jobs! We just need some posters who feel like chatting!
For what it’s worth, my younger son, only a college freshman, is in a field that appears to be booming. His major is construction management and he got an offer for an internship for next summer before he had even completed a month of college and after speaking with just two employers at a job fair. The three colleges we were looking at that had construction management (not construction engineering) majors all had 100% employment rates for their CM grads before graduation (2024 grad data as it was April 2025 when we were looking at final numbers) and it seems like a very strong field for young people interested.
@CC_Sorin I’m tagging you on this thread because it took me a LONG time to read it. I hadn’t read it for a few days so had a lot of posts to read. This thread jumped back many many posts more than several times. Lots of just taking me back 20 or so posts (that I had already read).
I’m tagging you here…because it happened on THIS thread.
Sorry to highjack, folks. I do not expect a response here.
Yeah, my kid who’s graduating in May will be doing so with a degree in media arts and production—both not the kind of thing generally being discussed here, and also a field for which the college senior hiring season hasn’t even started in earnest.
It makes the whole thing slightly weird to participate in.
This thread has been going on for lots of posts and over a year! I found it necessary to go back to reread the OP from April 2024 and thought it might be useful for others to see again, too:
So although the thread has meandered, it seems that its original purpose was about:
How challenging the job market might be
Experiences people have had (in the ‘24 or ‘25 job markets…or, presumably, upcoming years’ job markets)
How the current job market compares to that of previous years
From folks’ responses it seems as though the job market is pretty challenging, particularly in fields like CS and engineering that were quite hot in the not-too-distant past, but not impossible in all fields, as people have found jobs, whether through small, targeted searches or expansive blasts to anything remotely pertinent.
Posters have shared the experiences of recent or upcoming grads they know, whether the grads have been successful in the job hunt or are still in the process.
And individuals like @Blossom have tried to provide some historical context to the current downturn (which is down from booming years, but not too down from what used to be considered normal).
In order to keep the thread away from the need for future moderation, perhaps we can focus on those three topics from the OP?
