Imaginary STEM labor shortage
The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is not training employees and keeping them. Zig Ziglar Back when the economy wasn’t in the dumpster, I was talking to a friend who works at one of those Internet (with a capital I) companies. He was complaining about their inability to find people with the right qualifications. After spending time talking with him, I ascertained that what his company really wanted was for someone in the same position at a different company to be laid off so that they could hire them. His company had a very exacting list of qualifications and wasn’t willing to train any potential employees. They wanted someone off the shelf, so to speak, and weren’t going to take anyone without those qualifications. On the other hand, they would wait months rather than train the employees themselves. It didn’t make much sense to me at the time. FrauTech has…
Mixed signals
While I would really have loved the title to be a pun on signal processing, I have to admit that today’s post is not about that esteemed branch of electrical engineering. Instead, I’m going to talk about mixed messages I’ve been receiving. I had some colleagues from our university career center come and speak to students last week about the services they offer. Recently, the career center held a job fair, and one of the speakers said that many of the companies asked her where all the electrical engineers were. Apparently, the midwest has really had some serious job growth since the economic downturn in 2008, and there just aren’t enough students for internships and maybe even jobs. While I appreciate that being the perspective from a career counselor, I spent a bit of time looking over the engineering entry in the occupational outlook handbook compiled by the Bureau of Labor…
Overhaul academia – except in engineering
I’ve come across yet another article on how academia needs to be overhauled. I find these articles interesting because, from the perspective of a scientist, I definitely see where the problem is. On the other hand, I don’t see this as often in engineering. Most of the arguments against the current academic system of training PhDs involves the law of numbers – there are simply too many PhDs and not enough academic jobs to support them. Be that as it may, this doesn’t seem to be as horrible in engineering. I think there are a couple things that make getting a PhD in engineering an easier choice. (Keep in mind that I’m making sweeping generalizations based on my observations and comments from various professors over the years.) First, I think very few engineers actually want to get a PhD. Most see the path to higher marketability as coming through an…