I would just like to voice my complaints regarding my inability to find engineering related employment for the following reasons
a) Poor pay relative to other professions with similar educational and experience requirements (medicine, dentistry, law).
b) High risk of not finding a job, or being stuck in a job and being unable to move if a spouse/relative requires.
c) Riskier employers typically, versus relatively stable employers like banks and government. With little to no extra pay to compensate. Engineering employers in smaller cities have an attitude that they should be paying less than in the big cities, which is completely counterintuitive.
d) Ridiculous amounts of offshore competition and an attitude that everything that can be offshored, should be offshored.
e) Poor promotion opportunities if one wants to pursue a non-technical path.
f) Poor working conditions. Offices often aren't very nice, or engineers are asked to work in cubicles. Treated more like 'labour' than professionals. Advice is often ignored if it costs money.
g) Extreme difficulty moving to other professions, because engineering coursework is harder, and instead of being benchmarked against average people in college, you're graded/benchmarked against the top quartile. Many employers simply won't consider engineers for non-engineering positions.
Most of my classmates and I have had extreme difficulty finding jobs, or have been forced to find new jobs because of poor opportunities in the field, or firms that we work for simply going out of business. Its been an absolutely dreadful past decade, that's for sure. Electrical/Computer has been hit especially hard because of the collapse of Nortel.
a) Poor pay relative to other professions with similar educational and experience requirements (medicine, dentistry, law).
b) High risk of not finding a job, or being stuck in a job and being unable to move if a spouse/relative requires.
c) Riskier employers typically, versus relatively stable employers like banks and government. With little to no extra pay to compensate. Engineering employers in smaller cities have an attitude that they should be paying less than in the big cities, which is completely counterintuitive.
d) Ridiculous amounts of offshore competition and an attitude that everything that can be offshored, should be offshored.
e) Poor promotion opportunities if one wants to pursue a non-technical path.
f) Poor working conditions. Offices often aren't very nice, or engineers are asked to work in cubicles. Treated more like 'labour' than professionals. Advice is often ignored if it costs money.
g) Extreme difficulty moving to other professions, because engineering coursework is harder, and instead of being benchmarked against average people in college, you're graded/benchmarked against the top quartile. Many employers simply won't consider engineers for non-engineering positions.
Most of my classmates and I have had extreme difficulty finding jobs, or have been forced to find new jobs because of poor opportunities in the field, or firms that we work for simply going out of business. Its been an absolutely dreadful past decade, that's for sure. Electrical/Computer has been hit especially hard because of the collapse of Nortel.