The Big (Employment) Squeeze
It’s funny how information tends to come in waves. Recently, I came across two articles that had similar themes about different victims. The first was the notion that engineers that are over 35 are essentially unemployable. The opinion piece from CNN discusses how “older” workers are perceived as too expensive to hire. It also discusses how the point of mass layoffs is to eliminate the older, more expensive workers and foist more work on less people. Fluxor has discussed the reality of this situation in many of his posts. Shortly before this article came out, another one showed up on Bloomberg. This one had the age of unemployability as 40, but around the same ballpark. All of this has been discussed often on EngineerBlogs. However, what brought this to mind was an article I came across a few weeks ago. This one talked about the other end of the employment…
STEM graduate crunch solved
We’ve been hearing a lot on how there is a huge shortage of STEM workers and how the US needs to have more to stay on top. It looks like our concerns are well on our way to being fixed. The financial sector is apparently downsizing, so all those tech majors who originally planned to go into business and banking are thinking of a career in…you guessed it…engineering! An article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek discusses the fact that the financial sector has been seriously cutting down on hiring. Many tech majors discussed in the article said that they majored in technical fields to get into finance, but now that jobs aren’t available, they’re looking for jobs doing the stuff they were actually trained to do. The article does mention that things are shaky in the tech sector, but says that, “few expect Silicon Valley to undergo the carnage suffered by Wall…
STEM Recruitment Ponzi Scheme
A couple of days ago my colleague GEARS covered some STEM Employment Data that the US Department of Commerce recently released titled STEM: Good Jobs Now and for the Future. Regular readers of mine know I tend to be overly critical of these sorts of assessments. I tend to see them as optimistic and naive. On my own blog a couple weeks ago I talked about engineering jobs by discipline, then I looked at engineering employment over time and engineering pay, and then I broke down engineering employment and pay for mechanical, civil, and electrical engineers. One of the favorite myths the powers that be like to toss around is that a bunch of engineers and technical workers are going to suddenly retire and STEM jobs will be in demand. So in my eyes this report isn’t a whole lot different. Their two major claims: that a STEM degree leads…
STEM Employment Data
This past weekend, Ken Cid from the US Department of Commerce was nice enough to leave us a comment about the administration’s jobs prospects for STEM workers. The link to their blog is here [figure credit] and the actual report can be downloaded from here. Naturally, this sent us Engineer Bloggers into a tizzy for two reasons. One, They found us! And two, we would actually have to craft some sort of response that might actually be read by government media folks. You’ll probably find a better response from Chris Gammell or FrauTech, who are much better with stats than I am. Sadly, they post later in the week so you’re stuck with me for now. In Summary: The STEM Jobs Report says that 7.6M people or 5.5% of the workforce is employed in STEM fields and over the past 10 years, STEM fields have had more job growth than non-STEM fields. Also,…