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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
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.
| "It's a little bit more of a struggle finding entry-level electricals out there." | 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 |
| "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 |
| "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 |
| "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 |
| "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 |