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Employer Quotes

The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Engineering

They are talking about this topic: Workforce Trends & Challenges

 

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The quotes below are about this issue:
Perhaps more than other industries, employers in the engineering industry are having difficulty filling mid-level to senior-level positions. Several mention difficulty finding candidates with three to five years of experience. This may be a result of the recession. Students who graduated during the recession may not have been hired immediately and therefore have not had the opportunity to gain that experience.

Employer Quote Region
"If we're looking to fill from a computer standpoint—not that we've had to fill one for a while—we'd be looking more at the BCIS [business communication information systems ] because we need the business side with the computer. It doesn't matter what position you're in with IT, you need the interpersonal skills because you'll be working with a business unit. You're not going to be crunching behind the desk programming. Our main focus would be the BCIS; that's what we're looking to fill. Typically, they're probably more at a senior-level than not. We're looking for someone that's been in the profession—someone with a bachelor's plus five to 10 years of experience." Central
"We're mainly focused on mechanical and industrial engineers. We haven't had too many computer engineering openings at this point. We are filling more at a senior-level than from a technician standpoint." Central
"We do have a pretty good entry-level candidate pool, although maybe other firms don't feel that way. But when we can't find those mid-levels, we look for ways to push the folks with three to four years of experience to get them up to speed, and then fill in behind them with entry-levels. It has been a tactic we use to fill that gap." Metro
"We graph the years of experience—or at least I do—based on discipline. And on almost all of the disciplines, I've got this chunk of folks with the experience that are going to retire. There is this little gap in the 10 to 15 year range. There is—just like a camel—that second hump of a lot of great new entry-levels. But for us it takes a lot of mentoring. You come out of school with a good engineering degree and good basics, but you really learn how to do the job while on the job. So, we really need a lot of those mid-levels to mentor the younger hires. For every three entry-level hires, we try to hire one mid-level person to mentor." Metro
"Our experience has been that we've been able to find pretty good entry-level candidates. Where we struggle is if we need to hire more experienced candidates. That has been a difficult challenge." Metro
"Geotechnical may be a gap area. We have a large and growing geotechnical group and we have a pretty good relationship with the professors at the university, so we are getting their good students. But we still struggle, so we'll often go to international students. A lot of them, at least in my business, have been at the geotechnical master's level or PhD level." Metro
"Where we see a shortage is when you hire a bunch of entry-level people, and you need a more senior-level person to mentor and help them. That is where a lot of it our shortages are. It is a pretty significant struggle." Metro
"It's a little bit more of a struggle finding entry-level electricals out there." Metro
"For us, finding them at entry-level, we do fairly well. We've got relationships with the colleges. But we're looking for a mechanical engineer, kind of a practice builder, that mid-level 10 to 15 years of experience, and that's a long process." Northeast
"Yeah, even finding someone in the five-year range of experience is difficult. When we first started looking for five years of experience, well, that's hard to find." Northeast
"We hire mechanical, electrical, controls, and software engineers. And I thought it was interesting with mechanical supposedly being on the decline because we're actually finding the opposite. But, of course, we're looking for experience too, and that's what hurts. That is hard." Northwest
"Graduates do require a bit of recruiting at some of the four-year colleges. But we've hired quite a few because we've not been able to get those experienced-type of engineers that we're looking for. So, we're thinking, 'Well, we need to invest in hiring the younger ones.' And on-the-job training has worked fairly well for us." Northwest
"I was talking about looking for experience, and when we talk about hiring someone out of college, they have been very well prepared in general. And then we can kind of mold them. But sometimes we need someone who can just hit the ground running. What we find is—we're in the packaging machinery industry—that to hire an experienced engineer that has never been in our industry, it's almost like them starting over for a while, just to learn our industry. And then, of course, they require a significantly higher salary, but they don't bring us the value right away. So, when I'm looking for experience, I'm looking specifically in our industry, and that is what's so difficult." Northwest
"If candidates are coming from a different industry and they're going to take six months to a year to really add value and get up to speed—you have to be really careful with that. In fact, that is a deal breaker." Northwest
"We will hire people right out of college, but we need to balance it. We need people right out of college, but we need some experience, too, and those experienced ones are very difficult to find. We are currently looking for mechanical." Northwest
"We don't usually have a problem recruiting applicants, but we do have problems recruiting applicants with special experience in our industry. The university gives us lots of applicants, and we do hire a lot of them. But to find someone with experience and to convince them to move to Mankato—when the Twin Cities are so close and the salary levels are higher—it affects our recruiting efforts. It's very difficult to convince someone to work here when they really want to work in the Cities and make more money. We have to find a way to convince them that this is a good spot." Southwest
"Finding the more experienced guys makes a whole difference. We have one engineer, the only other engineer at our company who's retiring, so we've been trying to hire someone with experience to replace him. We've had no luck. We've had a few interviews, but not anything that really fit the bill on mortars. So, the recruiters—the word from them was that location is the issue. So, right now, we're looking to hire a new graduate, maybe get somebody in and get them going. And we've had several interviews and some are very good, some are very good kids coming out of school." Southwest
"If we could find people with one or two years of experience, that'd be helpful. Four to seven years would be better. And you could find people with 30 or 40 years of experience, but that's not a long-term solution." Southwest
"As the economy is picking up and private industry is picking up, we're still in the lag. We're still stuck with the low budgets of the public sector. And we saw a lot of early retirements, a lot of people that—because of lack of work and needing to reduce the workforce—were never replaced after retirement. So, now, as things are starting to pick up, we're going to have a big need for additional workers, probably in the next few years. And it's going to have to be young force, or we'll bring some of the older people back. But I think that the need and the gap is really going to be in the younger staff. That's where we just haven't hired as many on that level and as we intended to. The difficult thing is to find somebody who's got the four, five, or six years of experience because nobody hired them three or four years ago." Southwest