Electrical Engineer having a really tough time finding a job

[sdaccord01]

Hi, I am a recent grad out of UC San Diego and majored in Electrical Engineering. I am having an extremely tough time finding a job, and looking at websites such as Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, BAJobs.com and just not finding anything that is considered entry level. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person around here who is a recent graduate having a tough time finding a job, but I think it's gotten to a point where it seems like you have to have 5-7 years of experience to even qualify for most of the jobs out there. How can you even obtain that if most companies won't even want to hire entry level engineers like myself? It doesn't make sense, when everybody's talking about how to job market is getting better, but I don't see it helping me at all. I have some experience in the engineering field, and that was doing a 3 month project at Northrop Grumman, a highly credible engineering company. I know this won't help much, but trying to not waste time, I'm going to try to get an EIT certificate just to make my resume look a little better. I am in the Bay Area right now, and even with Silicon Valley about an hour away from me it's still tough to find those entry level jobs. Any advice is much appreciated.

 

[pookguy88]

i'm CE up here in Canada, same boat as u man, working at a call centre right now. i guess its ok for temp position.

keep looking, thats what i'm going to do. All my engineer friends who have jobs all got them through contacts.

 

[GiLtY]

Check out the unemployment thread. Good luck!!

--GiLtY

 

[Megatomic]

Move to an area with heavy industry. Chemical plants, power plants, auto factories, etc.

 

[jtusa]

Talk to people you graduated with who got jobs. I had a couple friends that got jobs real quick just by chance and their employers said "know anyone else"? That's how most of the people I graduated with got work.

 

[CrazyDe1]

Originally posted by: sdaccord01
Hi, I am a recent grad out of UC San Diego and majored in Electrical Engineering. I am having an extremely tough time finding a job, and looking at websites such as Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, BAJobs.com and just not finding anything that is considered entry level. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person around here who is a recent graduate having a tough time finding a job, but I think it's gotten to a point where it seems like you have to have 5-7 years of experience to even qualify for most of the jobs out there. How can you even obtain that if most companies won't even want to hire entry level engineers like myself? It doesn't make sense, when everybody's talking about how to job market is getting better, but I don't see it helping me at all. I have some experience in the engineering field, and that was doing a 3 month project at Northrop Grumman, a highly credible engineering company. I know this won't help much, but trying to not waste time, I'm going to try to get an EIT certificate just to make my resume look a little better. I am in the Bay Area right now, and even with Silicon Valley about an hour away from me it's still tough to find those entry level jobs. Any advice is much appreciated.

Look, you're never going to get a job if you sit there and do what everyone else is doing. This includes going to websites especailly like monster, careerbuilder, bajobs. Small businesses and companies are the foundation of this country. You need to find these companies. Here is how I got 8 or 9 interviews in a 3 week span and 2 offers in jobs I wasn't interested in(I ended up working for free for 3 months at my current company because it was what I wanted to do, and the experience would benefit me way more than taking an IT or web developer position just for a paycheck).

1. Watch the stock channel(I don't know which one it is but they talk about stocks all day) and then go to websites of companies who do well and look for jobs.
2. Look at local business journals to see what companies are growing and have had major press releases lately. Again, go and apply for these companies.
3. This is my money strategy, don't go spreading this around too much, let's say you want a certain job. Hardware design engineer. Go to google, type in hardware design engineer and your state. Now what this does is pulls up other people's resumes looking for jobs as well. However, you can look at their resumes and see where they worked and apply for these companies.
4. Always apply for jobs you're not qualified for. The worst they could do is reject you...I've had companies call back who needed experienced candidates.

 

[CanOWorms]

I have a friend who went to an industry conference (he went to an embedded systems conference) and he got a job within a few days as a software/hardware/QA engineer. You should try that out. Your profile says that you live in the Bay Area, there must be a lot of conferences going on there.