Is anyone hiring right now? Several of my clients are starting to recruit including Right Hand Technologies (RHT). Please go to http://www.righthandtech.com/ for more details on this unique engineering consulting company.
Within the last 90 days, RHT added 3 experienced hardware design engineers, each with more than 7 years experience. Furthermore, they plan to add one or two more according to senior engineer George Dotts. “These additions represent a 25% increase in our hardware engineering staff. Two of the positions are due to new contracts from existing clients. The other is for a new client. As a premier design consultancy in focused engineering markets, we require experienced engineers with at least 5 years experience. Therefore, you cannot extrapolate these hiring numbers to less experienced engineers,” says Mr. Dotts.
RHT has projected continued strong growth for 2010. Assuming those projections are met, they will be considering more junior hardware and software engineers in 2011 with the goals of: 1) freeing up the more experienced engineers from routine engineering tasks and 2) building a pool of internal talent that can be mentored and cultivated to become the future senior engineers.
Outside of RHT, I have seen mixed results. The December Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures showed that temporary hiring increased by 47,000. This demonstrates that companies are expanding, but are still hesitant to add full time employees. Indications of new job creation are mixed. For example, Telecom continues to be soft, IT seems to be gaining momentum and embedded software and hardware engineering has some positive results.
One Response
Some wonder if the fact that there are jobs that don’t come back mean that those jobs were unnecessary. I do not think they were unnecessary but they might have become unnecessary. The economy contracted but did not slow down in production times, so it needs less people. Also the contraction impacted salary levels, which I think have gone down in many cases. So it got harder for people with much more experience/longer time in the market because all of the sudden they might have become expensive (?).
There is also a change in focus, I think, aligned with a change in the technological side of things in the world— a new economy. I think anyone performing a job too ingrained in the old economy will have to re-train. This includes professionals. There is a change and we have to readjust.
Flexibility is a key word I think. Some might need to find a different field or tune up their expertise as each field replenishes every year with newer generations of professionals already aligned with the new concepts and technologies. And not all fields are elastic enough to accommodate all the newcomers while keeping the older folks.
But overall I honestly think this is not just an economic issue. I think it is an economic and political reaction in response to a cultural shift to adapt to bigger issues such as overpopulation, lack or ongoing reduction of basic resources (water, energy, food), climate change, and so on. I think the world has come to the point when it could not sustain the “lifestyle.” So… flexibility and adaptation are key components of each individual/worker/professional’s survival now more than ever.
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