why it is so hard and competitive to get an engineer job?university is not helpful?

<p>transfer to a state university soon, i feel like i learn nothing productive for the industries. i just learn some book’s formulas and theories that have little to do with the real world. i dont feel anything remotely closed to be an engineer or even to be a technician. even if i did graduated with a engineer degree,electrical engineer as for me,i will have little chance to be employed with an engineer job. i have friends and families have solid GPA and went to top tier engineer school but most of them end up working a job have to do nothing with engineer with wage $13/hr.
for examples:
1, a friend who went to UC Berkeley for engineer(dont remember which engineer field) and graduated with 3.7GPA but after trying for almost a year and end up working in some paper company that paid around $10/hr.
2, another friend of a friend who also went to UC Berkeley for Civil Engineer(i think) and graduated with good GPA(cant remember the specific). wondering around for engineer job about half a year and end up go back to her family and working some part time job.
3,another friend who major in EE with Power based, he went to a state university that ranking decent in engineer program. graduated with around 3.3 GPA with like one internship or so. guess what happens next? same thing! cant get an engineer job and end up working for comcast as a technician who the one install wires in people’s home.
4, this one is personal, my brother! he also graduated from a state university with 3.6 GPA Electrical engineer-power. while he was in college, he tried to get an internship over dozen times but no one offer him anything. once he graduated, trying over a year with sending ~100 resumes with luckily few interviews but once again, no job offer. now he just sit back at home and playing video games. </p>

<p>on internships, it is hard as to get the career itself. i look up my soon-to-be university’s engineer resumes with most of them ~3.5GPA with solid real field experience; even a handful of them already have a Master degree who competed for the exact position as the one who do not have. honestly, my GPA is not even that high(sub 3.0) and with zero experience so far. i feel like im going to a warzone with a stick whereas everyone using assault rifles. funny thing is our government and companies are whining over “shortage” of engineer in USA so they decide to increase the cap H1B visa to 180K. why is this like this nowadays? arent engineer easier to find jobs than most majors?
note: i didnt really proof read this yet so it might sound chopping and confusing; im just depressing to read it again.</p>

<p>The civil engineering job market was poor for several years due to the real estate and construction driven economic downturn that you may have heard about. The economic downturn was bad for hiring in general, though.</p>

<p>yes, that’s true but even in good economy, the competition is go thru the roof. you have to competing against other engineers from university especially the tier one, and those who have a master degree, and the Visa workers from china and india can provide more less than half salary than the american one with all of these groups fighting for one position. get the idea? when you do get that job, the salary just decent nowadays. yep! let go to the engineer fields so they says.</p>

<p>I’ve not heard of the company which says, “You’re not a US citizen, we’ll pay you half of what we pay everyone else.” Which companies do you know of that do that? </p>

<p>I don’t know what’s wrong with the people you mentioned (except person 2 - they picked the wrong major) but they are abnormal.</p>

<p>thx for replied, which two major? EE? abnormal? these people are well-going and caring people like the rest of us. companies do pay less for H1B visa workers because with all their lawyers and technical terms and their interpretation of the laws lead them to pay less. But its not really matter for this point.</p>

<p>Direct-hiring H-1B visa employees is more of a hassle due to the lawyers and such.</p>

<p>However, most of the H-1B visas are being hogged by outsourcing companies, which is bad for both employees in general and employers that need a few H-1B visas for the purpose they were meant for (hiring top foreign talent). Perhaps the problem could be solved if there were some way to exclude the outsourcing companies from H-1B visas.</p>

<p>PowerEE, I feel your pain. I graduated with an EE degree 20 years ago when the market was hot. I couldn’t find a job. Furthermore, I didn’t learn anything practical to be of any use to a company. My first job was as a network engineer working with Unix systems. This absolutely was nothing I learned in school. Second job was more of a technician’s job despite the engineering title. Had to be trained for months to be useful.</p>

<p>I would definitely recommend internships for all engineering students or an engineering technology associate degree from a CC before continuing on to a BS. If a student can’t do either, then attend one of those intense programming classes to develop useful skills to be marketable. </p>

<p>Personally, other than petroleum engineering, I do not believe there is a shortage of engineers in the US. There is just a shortage of engineers the companies can pay very little.</p>

<p>I’m sorry but these situations are not the norm at my school. Most of my friends (with respectable gpa’s) easily got internships and jobs. Internships all paid $20+ per hour, mine paid $25/hr. The only thing that I can think of that could even cause this situation is these people are not wanting to relocate. If that is the case then they are doing it to themselves.</p>

<p>most of them are relocated for their 4 years university. im pretty sure they are willing to relocated again for a career. like i said, getting internships is hard enough. dozens of people fighting over one intern spot.</p>

<p>im scared for my life cuz of my sub 3.0 GPA from CC will haunted forever; i usually slacking and bad at time management but now i have more confident and will power due to seeing a lot of bad outcomes from my life and friends; i use these as an inspiration as if i dont change, i will end up like these.</p>

<p>edited: another question: for internship, which GPA do companies look for? GPA from CC or university? because once i start at my 4 years university, i dont have a lot classes but if i wait to build up classes then statistically my chances to get internship even fewer.</p>

<p>I had sub 3 gpa and found and internship and 4 job offers. You got to connect, ask people you know and be able to communicate its not about what you learn in school, thats just for the piece of paper. I also put in a lot of work, if you know what you want to do, dont apply online, email a mother trucker at the company and ask them if there looking to hire, **** works.</p>

<p>thx for advices but arent the people who apply online will get the spot first? my plan is get extracurricular and leadership role in a club to compensate my poor CC GPA. and i have a hard time to find companies online for EE in the first place, keep showing the useless indeed sites and sites like internships.com doesnt help much.</p>

<p>You know what they teach in statistics: four anecdotes equals a trend.</p>

<p>On the whole, engineers still have a much better unemployment rate than most other occupations, even if it is still a little slow given the economy. The odds are instead that your civil engineering example just graduated into a terrible market after the housing and construction bubble burst and there were some sort of issue with each of the other three examples. Without more info, there is no way to even speculate as to what those issues may have been.</p>

<p>There has been a lot of noise made about the engineering shortage, and while most people agree there is a real shortage, the market hasn’t really showed it. For example, if there was a shortage, you would expect salaries to rise faster, but they haven’t. The problem is that while there are a lot of jobs open for engineers, businesses are having a hard time finding engineers with the skills they are actually looking for to fill these positions.</p>

<p>The actual problem there depends on your perspective. From the businesses’ point of view, colleges aren’t preparing students with the right skills to meet their demands. The Wall Street Journal has a significant number of articles about this and they are rather interesting. Probably the largest complaint is poor verbal and [written[/url</a>] communication skills on the part of new engineers, but there are a host of others.</p>

<p>Of course, from the other side of things, businesses seem much less likely to be willing to train new employees as much as they used to ([url=&lt;a href=“Don't Blame Students for the Jobs-Skills Mismatch - WSJ”&gt;Don't Blame Students for the Jobs-Skills Mismatch - WSJ]example](<a href=“Our College Graduates Can't Write! - WSJ”>Our College Graduates Can't Write! - WSJ)</a>). They want to see those employees come in and make and immediate impact, and that is often unrealistic. This trend is noticeable in that these days internships are all but required to get a job immediately after graduation, which wasn’t always the case. It just so happens that however degree programs are structured overseas may currently better suit this particular model of hiring, so you see a lot of that going on.</p>

<p>The solution probably needs to be somewhere in between. Colleges need to do a better job of trying to meet the needs of employers, particularly in communication skills, but companies need to realize that at times they seem to wish engineering degrees were more vocational, and that really doesn’t breed innovative engineers, so they need to move back toward being willing to train new employees more.</p>

<p>And now I’ve ranted. Sorry about that.</p>

<p>The other problem that affects the labor market in general is that the labor market shifts (in terms of skills and credentials desired to hire) are happening faster these days, while the acquisition of needed skills and credentials is not getting faster at the same rate (and may be getting slower and more expensive in many cases, due to demand for more complex skills and “higher level” credentials).</p>

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<p>Absolutely not. Applying online only is kind of like throwing your resume into a black hole and hoping some hiring manager manages to snag it before it is gone to oblivion. It is always better to get some kind of more personal contact, be it in person (best), phone, email (just okay) or anything other than just applying to an online jobs system. Then managers are more likely to go searching for your info.</p>

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<p>Companies are really not going to care what GPA you had in community college. They will want to know how you fared in your classes in your major, especially those relevant to the job you are seeking, and will want to know that you can communicate clearly and work well with others. The best way to demonstrate the latter of those two qualities is to actually talk with a person who is doing the hiring.</p>

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<p>Does your school have a career center or a career fair? Those are your best resources.</p>

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<p>That’s a good point, and I would argue that it is an example of why companies need to go back to training their employees upon hiring. There is no way good way colleges can keep up and train students for all these different skill sets that different companies need. I think some of these companies need to realize that training new employees in the more specialized skills shouldn’t be too difficult assuming they are quality engineers to begin with, assuming, of course, that all the underlying engineering schools have already been instilled by the school and they can communicate effectively already.</p>

<p>I really do think it is a case of the combined obstinance on the part of some engineering programs and unrealistic expectations of companies doing the hiring. I also think this is a bigger problem in the tech industry, as most “traditional” engineering industries seem to be more willing to provide on-the-job training. I don’t think the workers they import to fill these skills are necessarily better engineers than the domestic workers; they just happen to have had those skills before and likely have missed out on other potentially useful skills in the process.</p>

<p>When you get to university, first thing you should do is visit the career center. Make sure you know how to write a resume properly and learn networking techniques. Next join a club that gives you hands on experience building something that you can talk about with recruiters. </p>

<p>It’s not just your degree, you have to learn skills you won’t get out of a book. There are some tips and tricks that the career center will show you that will help out tremendously. I am in the same boat, EE major, first year at university from community college. I have received a ton of info just this week on how to market myself. Everyone has their own unique situation so take others with a grain of salt.</p>

<p>Just an comment: I am now retired, but when I was sorting thru resumes looking to hire an engineer and I came across one with as many grammar and word selection mistakes as your posting, it would end up in the round file so fast. One needs good communication skills to be a professional engineer. Your reports are trying to communicate some pretty detailed information. Miscommunication can be costly and many times dangerous. Best not to have to deal with it IMHO.</p>

<p>Agree with HPuck; your written language skills are extremely weak. If you can’t communicate well in writing a business proposal, you won’t be hired. Plus, you need to be able to speak to the clients in a professional, syntactically-appropriate manner. My dd recently received several offers of employment because she took an additional year of classes in software. So, she became an EE with Java and other software in her resume. </p>

<p>Are you an international candidate? If so, many companies, that are looking for EE’s, are clients of the federal government. The feds require security clearances and in a majority of cases, those jobs require US citizenship.</p>

<p>thanks! sadly, my writing is my biggest pullback after GPA. you can guess that i wasn’t born here and i was learning another language before English. i’ve spend most of my time on STEM area yet little time to improve my writing skill especially in word choices/grammar as many my English instructors told me to improve.</p>

<p>I second (or third?) the advice to use the career center at your university. They should be able to assist with resume writing, mock interviews, internship contacts and possibly host recruiting fairs. They should also have stats on internships and hiring that you may find helpful.
At my D2’s engr. school, they have great resources and host three job fairs each year. 90% of kids have at least one paid internship or co-op before they graduate. And 93% of the class of 2012 had jobs landed (or were committed to grad school or military) before they graduated. D2 started attending the fairs last year as a freshman as all are encouraged to start networking and practicing their skills. She hopes to land an internship this summer.</p>