So what kind of Engineer are you NOW?

Nancy Anderson
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Last week we walked through a small portion of the maze that may contain the answer to that question. Engineering jobs can be very finite and concentrated in a rare niche of specialized expertise, or be applied to a more general application. Since you are still the “Free Agent Engineer in Charge”, the choice of what you pursue next is clearly up to you.




To take a look at what the engineering positions available now have evolved into, I searched one site. Since I’m near Detroit I searched simply for “Engineer”, in Michigan. Now for all of you folks who continue to hear “there is nothing available”, I will report that as of this morning that filter yielded 8,796 jobs that included the word Engineer. Almost 9,000 listings in a state where industry is reportedly in a coma! Not to over simplify again, but go check out what they are looking for. The listing titles included:



These are a few of the more interesting titles I plucked off of just the first 5 of 287 pages. Are they real? Well I checked, and none of them took me to a recruiter’s page instead of the company’s HR section. Will they get these filled? Pretty sure! There are still the other 8,784 listings you can check out. (When I eliminated “Michigan” from the filter, the number of Engineering related listings totaled 283,914.)


OK. So what’s my point? That I can do a job search? No, my point is that last week when I charged you with the statement “We all know more about different ways of using our training than we admit!”, this is what I was talking about!


THE CHARGE: This week I challenge any of you PE’s out there, with any amount of experience, to read 283,914 Engineering related job descriptions and not think to yourself “Hey, I could do that!” on more than a few of them.


THE EXPECTED RESULT: Best case: you might actually find a position or work you want to do somewhere in there. Worst case: You have begun! Your brain will start to integrate all of these position and task descriptions, and all the different kinds of firms that list them.
Grab the reading glasses and another cup of coffee and have at it! You will see new jobs, you will see some you can do, and your brain will work on new concepts further even when you’re out shoveling that snow.

You can do this!

K.B. Elliott is a Detroit area contributing writer for Nexxt. Having worked seats on both sides of the engineering trades for over 30 years gives a unique perspective to the work search process and the varieties of successes to be had.

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