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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.
| "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 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 |
| "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 |