Jobs grew only slightly last month according to this morning’s reports from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Only 49,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs were created in January according to BLS. The reason for such tepid jobs growth was the labor market continued to reflect the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and efforts to contain it.
In January, BLS reported job gains in professional and business services and in both public and private education. However, there were jobs losses in leisure and hospitality, in retail trade, transportation and warehousing and EVEN health care, which has been a long-term engine for jobs growth!
Conversely, the unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage point to 6.3 percent. This was in large part to engineering jobs recruiting continuing at a rapid pace due to the importance of engineers to forthcoming company products and earnings.
Engineering Jobs Recruiting Adding More Job Candidates
Because engineering is one of the most rewarding professions in the world, an engineering degree is a ticket to jobs with huge salaries! As a result, engineering job recruiting is continuing at a breakneck pace.
Jobs in engineering are especially being fueled by cutting-edge industries such as artificial intelligence or AI, virtual reality or VR, augmented reality or AR, robotics and internet of things or IoT. These jobs have offset decreases in other employment sectors.
Because of this increased engineering recruiting appetite in these cutting-edge fields, engineer jobs are going unfilled in other fields. This has also carried over to parallel roles such as technical, research and development or R&D, scientific, information technology or IT and manufacturing technology for many industries.
More Efforts Needed For Recruiting Engineers For Staffing
Much more needs to be done by federal, state and local governments to assist engineering jobs recruiting efforts. For example, greater efforts to develop STEM programs including recruiting more talented STEM teachers for minting future engineering talent.
Additionally, within companies, staffing departments need to improve their engineering recruitment efforts. One way to achieve this is reviewing your company’s overall message to ensure that you have positioned yourselves as a viable place for engineers to work.
Furthermore, staffing managers need to identify better methods for recruiting candidates for their companies. This can include a) identifying competitors b) uncovering viable research and development candidates within those competitors c) contributing to research and development blogs and magazines to get noticed by the engineer candidates you seek and d) connecting to LinkedIn candidates who may become future candidates.
Then even if a desired engineer either leaves your company or and engineering jobs candidate turns your job offer down, you will have many ready engineering replacements.
Call me today at 312-944-4000 to discuss how we can assist with your R&D, engineering, scientific, technical, IT and manufacturing recruitment efforts in the highly competitive fields of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Internet of Things (IoT) as well as Virtual (and Augmented) Reality. Or click here for my full contact information.
