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I sympathize with you, Chemical Engineer unemployed since february 2015 and depressed. I didn´t know Mechanical Engineers are now in tough times. Back in the time I was studying, I left BS Mechanical Engineer and validated the courses I passed to start with Chemical Engineering and I thought It was a bad decision since there were more Mechanical Engineering jobs rather than Chemical Engineering jobs (in Europe).
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Originally Posted by TestEngr
the corporations moved all the real engineering positons overseas.
I am now overseas and looking for jobs everywhere, could you please tell me where are those jobs? and I will apply in those countries. Thanks.
I am now overseas and looking for jobs everywhere, could you please tell me where are those jobs? and I will apply in those countries. Thanks.
Try big cities in SE Asia if you are serious. Seriously huge plants hiring thousands in those places, old rice fields are now huge semiconductor and electronic manufacturing facilities. I have seen them and the numbers of these plants double all the time. They hire all of them EE, ME. Not sure on ChemE out of my areas.
What work experience do you have? Did you do any internships while in school?
"I am socially awkward and therefore a poor interviewer"
You need to work on that. Regardless of how brilliant an Engineer you may actually be, if you give the impression of not being able to communicate with others, no organization in their right mind would hire you.
During my years at university, I did some research over one of the summers in the mechanical engineering department. I approached the professor of one of my classes and asked if I could do some research. I got the idea from a grad student who worked for him. My time here was spent learning what stuff others were working on and attempting to help design an enclosure (which I failed at). My experiment was delayed because of broken parts that were being fixed on some of the equipment, and by the time everything was ready, I only had a week or less to work on an experiment, which did not go well.
I also did a co-op for 1 semester with a testing company for the construction industry, which is not very relevant to my degree. This co-op was more manual labor than anything, with no engineering involved, but I did get a couple of NY state certifications in asphalt quality assurance.
So while I did get an internship and a co-op in school, I did not enjoy them. When asked about these experiences in interviews, I feel anxious because I didn't do very well in my research and my co-op was pretty much manual labor.
What are some ways to improve my communication skills? I did take voice lessons for one semester to strengthen my voice, but I am a reserved and shy person.
What are some ways to improve my communication skills? I did take voice lessons for one semester to strengthen my voice, but I am a reserved and shy person.
I find some of the advice here somewhat amusing since we have a hard time finding qualified engineers. (And before someone goes there, no, we don't hire H1bs; we seriously can't get qualified engineers who want to work).
Ok what is a qualified engineer I'm looking for (in general terms)? You have a degree in engineering. Check. What field? Ok what courses did you take? (helps to show what you actually studied and how much outside the box you were willing to go. I don't care that you studied the same steam tables as every other engineer; what did you study they didn't?) Did you do a project? In what? What did you learn? (I don't care if it was a success, what did you learn from it?) Did you work on team projects? What was your role on the team? How did the team do? How did you work with the team? How did you deal with conflict on the team? What did you do if someone didn't pull their weight? (Notice a theme here?) Did you participate in your professional society's student section? What role did you have? Were you active? (Message here for college students -- join those professional societies, write papers, attend conferences. I'm looking for something that illustrates initiative, leadership, teamwork, and frankly a sense that you actually give a $%^@ about your profession and professional growth.)
You see, folks with a STEM degree are a dime a dozen. But real, no kidding ENGINEERS and honest to goodness SCIENTISTS are hard to find. Those are the ones I'm looking for.
Now, if I may get personal, besides the shy and reserved, you also come across as lacking in confidence. If you come across that way in an interview, I'm sorry, but you won't get hired. This isn't an introvert/extrovert thing, but simply that lack of confidence will be seen as weakness and they'll eat you alive in this field. When you're in those meetings you have to be able to go toe to toe with managers and competitors who are pushing their agenda and you have to be confident in your results. Too much is riding on these decisions for half way measures and non committal answers.
Voice lessons might be nice, but what you really need in that arena is public speaking. While I don't normally recommend them, consider Toastmasters to improve your public persona in interviews. Also you might look into things like Rotary.
Are you a member of your professional society? If not join. Attend conferences in your field, even if you have to do it on your own dime a few times. This is where you make those professional contacts that can lead to jobs. Take on committees and presentations. Publish a paper. Not only do these make contacts, but you can put things like "Published two papers in Journal of whatever; led conference committee on XYZ for the Society of Engineering Stuff" on your resume and you quickly move up several notches in status.
I find some of the advice here somewhat amusing since we have a hard time finding qualified engineers. .
Top, really top notch, engineers are out there without jobs. Guys who can design better than anyone I know and saw them do it. Guys who can design and build products that work and can be sold. I also know some not so good engineers that write great resumes, and having worked with them I would never hire.
Point is on the good engineers, nobody will hire them. There are literally companies that laid off huge forces of engineers, tens of thousands at a time. You want R&D guys, they are out there, top notch ones. You want top notch manufacturing guys, they are out there. What do you want?
If anyone says they can't find engineers right now in one of the biggest down time for engineers that I ever saw, don't take their advice. I am told any ad in a paper or job site can bring in hundreds of applicants. Real good ones too. Sure you have to sort the real sincere from the ones who did paperwork, but I can tell you it is a complete joke to say you can't hire engineers when companies I know laid off tens of thousands and all kinds of every kind you want. ME, EE, R&D, Design, Manufacturing, Production, imaging, RF, ASIC, Test, Circuit, analog, software for manufacturing. You must have an area that is real super exclusive, what kind of products is your company into they can't hire engineers I'd like to know the products sold?
I'd also add some of the best engineers I know are not the best of talkers and not the most outgoing. Just happens a lot.
On the point of publishing papers. I do think that is good area to try. However, there are some companies that don't like it if it is a lot of papers. I usually leave 2 or 3 papers on my resume, if you end up doing lots of published articles, journals etc that becomes a negative to certain employers. They won't call when you list them all, they toss it instantly since the hiring manager never did that in many cases and may see you as a threat of sorts if you list too many.
It also helps to do peer review for communications skills, so volunteer for that if you publish.
During my years at university, I did some research over one of the summers in the mechanical engineering department. I approached the professor of one of my classes and asked if I could do some research. I got the idea from a grad student who worked for him. My time here was spent learning what stuff others were working on and attempting to help design an enclosure (which I failed at). My experiment was delayed because of broken parts that were being fixed on some of the equipment, and by the time everything was ready, I only had a week or less to work on an experiment, which did not go well.
I also did a co-op for 1 semester with a testing company for the construction industry, which is not very relevant to my degree. This co-op was more manual labor than anything, with no engineering involved, but I did get a couple of NY state certifications in asphalt quality assurance.
So while I did get an internship and a co-op in school, I did not enjoy them. When asked about these experiences in interviews, I feel anxious because I didn't do very well in my research and my co-op was pretty much manual labor.
What are some ways to improve my communication skills? I did take voice lessons for one semester to strengthen my voice, but I am a reserved and shy person.
It's not about the results of the research, it's about the experience. Think of your research experience as being about what you learned about project planning: It does not matter that your experiment failed but it DOES matter that you learned about planning a project and then what you learned from encountering failures in execution where you learned how important it is to have contingency plans in place for anything and everything.
So talk about how you've spent time thinking of countermeasures for another project, what steps you would take to inspect equipment ahead of time during the project-planning stages, or budgeting for backup units, or how to plan out alternative testing in the event of possible failures, etc.
From the construction industry experience, talk about the concepts you learned from asphalt QA. What is important isn't the asphalt, it's the concept of processes related to testing for quality. Did they cover validation of test equipment prior to testing? Raw materials QA prior to production of asphalt? Try to imagine overlaying those concepts into the manufacturing of products, if you're looking at manufacturing jobs in industries where QA is valued.
Maybe look into quality engineering certification with the ASQ. It doesn't mean that you have to go into QA work but could make you more attractive to employers in quality heavy industries.
Last edited by DriveNotCommute; 05-06-2016 at 10:26 AM..
Reason: Minor wording changes for clarity.
Top, really top notch, engineers are out there without jobs. ...
but I can tell you it is a complete joke to say you can't hire engineers when companies I know laid off tens of thousands and all kinds of every kind you want. ME, EE, R&D, Design, Manufacturing, Production, imaging, RF, ASIC, Test, Circuit, analog, software for manufacturing. You must have an area that is real super exclusive, what kind of products is your company into they can't hire engineers I'd like to know the products sold?
I'd also add some of the best engineers I know are not the best of talkers and not the most outgoing. Just happens a lot.
Well, I could say we don't make the products, we make the products better but I think someone else already used that line. We do independent aerospace R&D, so we hire a wide range of STEM skills. AE, ME, CE, EE, Physicists, Chemists, mathematicians, IT of all sorts. Heck, we even have some biologists and environment/wildlife folks on staff. If all those SSH engineers are out there, they sure aren't applying here. Last hire only had 20 applicants of which only three were qualified to bother looking at. Time before that, only got seven applicants and tossed all of them in the trash. I mean really bottom of the barrel resumes.
Everything we do is highly regulated so everything has to be documented well. I don't think most of the young engineers coming out even know the first thing about how to keep a proper notebook. Their written communication skills are non existent and they see no value in orderly records in an industry where lawyers will come back doing discovery on documents from the 1950s (literally I've spent hours crawling through musty files for someone's notebook on some project from 50 years ago). They don't understand the casualness we use here on a forum is not the same as writing a formal report for a customer. Ok, so we have to teach them record keeping, but I don't have time to go back to English 101.
As for some of the best engineers not being the best of talkers, I understand that. I'm about as far into the INTJ range as you can get. I'd much rather disappear into the lab myself and not have to talk to anyone. But that isn't the way things work. These projects are big, involve multiple contractors (where we're just one player) and sometimes multinationally; you have to be able to work on large teams with multiple disciplines as well as lots of skilled craft workers. And you have to be able to present your results to senior managers, not just internally, but from the customer and be able to sell the quality of your work to that customer and an often hostile audience of his staff and some of your competitors who he's hired to tear down your results.
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