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Employer Quotes
The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Engineering
They are talking about this topic: General Skills
The quotes below are about this issue:
Entry-level engineering positions often require strong leadership and project management skills; some employers report spending a significant amount of time training new hires in these skills. They feel that capstone projects and additional group-focused coursework would help build these skills.
| "They are given some more leadership opportunities through these design projects. And I think that is an area where—here at our company—we're also looking not only for the technical skills but also the people skills and the leadership skills. Many people need to be able to lead projects, so the opportunity for leadership skills in either project teams in school or some extracurricular organizations is important experience. I think the reason why our company doesn't have one person doing just project management is that technical people wear different hats. Part of the day they are over here as a project manager, and a third of their time they're doing business development, and then a third doing something else. We tend to have more than just one focus." | Metro |
| "My group is about two hundred people, and we really don't have a manager. We have somebody who is called a facilitator for two hundred people, and he does project work half-time. There is a lot of management within a project. You could be on multiple project teams." | Metro |
| "Leading a team and working well with a team. I would say that leadership is another piece that we're looking for here." | Metro |
| "For entry-level and particularly for our experienced hires, we need leadership skills because of our organizational structure and our consulting services. We need to be able to build relationships, sell the services, and cross-sell the services. So, we need people who can build an internal network across different divisions of the company as well as communicate with the clients. They need to be interested in understanding everything that we do, and they need to be able to communicate and bring the right people in. So, having that influence and having those consultation skills are both really important for experienced people and for people who want to be able to advance to project management or principal levels." | Metro |
| "Maybe the leadership end of it. That's where we find we spend most of our training with the early career type people in leadership roles, in developing them into the future managers of our business." | Northeast |
| "University systems, I don't believe, have anything on leading, but some of the mining schools do." | Northeast |
| "Our engineers actually develop into leadership and management roles. And the only way to get to that point is to start at the ground floor and work your way up. And these engineers aren't doing engineering work 100 percent of the time. Mostly, in our business, it's field-based engineers. Of those 60 at any property, maybe 10 of them are doing pure engineering. The other ones are managers; they're up there with maintenance. They're running the operations." | Northeast |
| "One thing we're trying to do, and we're going to do at [MnSCU college] is apply for a job skills partnership grant to bring leadership, development skills, and maybe executive leadership." | Southwest |
| "Here's the other dilemma: If you remember a few years ago, the legislature in their infinite wisdom took it from 128 credits down to 120. In essence, they did it to save students' money, but in the end they ended up costing the students more. School systems might need to maximize their course content to stay on the cutting edge, but what gives are the soft skills. So, you no longer have those courses available in business—or anyplace else—so that you can broaden the base. So, what we're having to do now, and we're doing it through our strategic partnership series, is taking it through the non-credit side with a leadership certificate for those other soft skills. Taking it through a certificate-driven program. Hit it and move on to the next one. But that's what's happened, and that's why there is a little bit of a soft spot with those soft skills. I don't know if you're at 120 credits or 124 now, but they've had to compress everything because of the legislative edict." | Southwest |
| "We hire mechanical, civil, and electrical engineers. And I'd say the civil engineers have more of the soft skills than the mechanical engineers do. Just because of the—I'd have to assume the program. I think they have projects where they do public speaking and those types of things. Leadership of teams? I don't know." | Southwest |
| "They don't have skills in leadership. They don't have skills in team-building. They really don't understand much of that and consequently we spend a lot of money training these people—especially the first three years with the company. You know, something like the Carnegie Training—like 12 weeks at three hours each and you get 36 hours. They don't grasp any of that at all. I don't know if they're not getting any of that in school, or if it's just not felt necessary to teach it in school? But most of our engineers actually manage a group of people." | Southwest |