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player ready...Recently, Lockheed Martin Corp. advertised 300 engineering positions in specialties ranging from aeronautics to manufacturing. Texas Instruments had 400 U.S. openings, 380 of them for engineers.
Engineers are in enormous demand nationwide and embody a number of disciplines–from computer and systems to electrical, civil and biomedical. Pure tech companies are only the tip of the iceberg, experts say.
“Hot areas for engineers are within the government and defense,” said Phillip Brown, director of Systems Engineering Associates and an expert on international systems engineering. “The telecommunications industry and the chip industry in California are down right now but only temporarily.”
Curt Eley, assistant dean of the Southern Methodist University School of Engineering, points to growth in industries such as retail, real estate and banking.
“So many positions are not in technology companies, but companies that need help with technology,” he explained.
Experts say that computer science, systems and software engineers are most employable at the moment.
Three areas within the information technology industry are expanding, according to a semi-annual hot jobs report from RHI Consulting: networking, Internet/intranet development and data/database management. Many jobs in those areas are quasi-engineering positions.
Brown said that almost anyone can take a course of study that includes networking and declare themselves a network engineer.
Certification programs in systems such as Oracle or Microsoft are available and often populated by engineers, but the two are not interchangeable.
Not all engineers are equal, and the difference is in the tools they use.
“Although engineering is done with the tools of information technology,” he explained, “the tools are not necessarily taught in the traditional engineering programs. Information technology is so hot right now, but it’s not traditional engineering.”
Large schools such as Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh are creating standards and tests for systems engineers.
“ABET is wrestling with these issues also,” said Brown, referring to the Accreditation Board of Electronic Technologies, the organization that bestows accreditation on university programs.