1. Skip to content

Employer Quotes

The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Engineering

They are talking about this topic: Workforce Trends & Challenges

 

Your Selection:


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
"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
"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
"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