Agilent does have a formal intern program, a holdover from its Hewlett-Packard days. It offers two types of intern positions: summer and co-op. Summer internships generally last three months between May and September. A co-op internship employs students for three to 12 months during the school year, allowing the students to earn credits at their university. The same benefits and processes apply for both types of interns.
Agilent's intern strategy is to identify, cultivate, and train interns as potential professional hires. Another part of the program is to identify Latino, African American, American Indian, women, and other diverse candidates. It also wants to expose interns to the company's products, business, organizational style, environment, and culture.
One of the biggest changes for EEs today and a generation ago is how they're compensated. The nominal average earnings of IEEE members have grown from $19,200 in 1971, for example, to $104,720 today. But most of this growth is inflationary. In 2000 constant dollars, the 1971 earnings figure is equivalent to $80,443. The buying power of engineers (along with virtually everyone else) was especially curtailed during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when double-digit inflation was rampant. Since 1989, the purchasing power of most EEs has steadily improved.
The median primary income of the IEEE's U.S. members is now $93,100, a nice jump from the 1999 figure of $82,000. Today's EEs also have stock options. More than a third of the IEEE U.S. members received stock options in 2000, according to the IEEE Salary & Fringe Benefit Survey conducted by IEEE-USA, the IEEE's Washington, D.C.-based lobbying organization.
Unfortunately, while the number of those receiving options has increased since 1997, with a median estimated value of $5000, fully one-third of all those receiving options assessed them as worthless by early 2001. Clearly, the dotcom investment mania has skewed the option compensation picture. According to Martin Cooper, now the chairman and CEO of ArrayComm, "A few years ago, people in my company were angry with me because we didn't think it was appropriate to go public. They were really mad. Jobs are harder to find, but no one reduced salaries when the dotcom crash occurred. Now, they're saying it's a lucky thing that we didn't go public." Cooper says that "now the engineers in our company want to know everything—our cash flow, our marketing approach. They want to be involved."
Samuel J. Horowitz joined DuPont 29 years ago. "While I expected to work for DuPont my whole career, I doubt that new hires have the same expectations," says Horowitz, the company's marketing manager for electronic materials. He has a similar take on the times. "A year-and-a-half ago, I think there were a large number of young engineers who fancied themselves as entrepreneurs and were looking to leave big companies. The end of the dotcom bubble and recession seems to have changed that. The last 18 months has been a rude awakening and a painful awakening."
IEEE members who have bothered to do the math should know. When you add the number of IEEE members whose options had no value to those who didn't receive any options, this accounts for more than two-thirds of the workforce. The bottom line is that, for typical U.S. members, the median value of stock options in 2000 was zero.
When it comes to compensation packages, management isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Management still pays very well, but not as well as EEs whose technical specialty is designing solid-state circuitry, where salary levels have typically climbed to $112,000 a year. Communications, broadcast technology, computer hardware, and Internet development and applications, as well as engineering in medicine and biology, aren't far behind.
Doing challenging and satisfying work is important to young engineers. According to the IEEE's recent member survey, EEs are reporting high levels of satisfaction with their jobs and the technical challenges of the work. Although it doesn't seem to be a big issue at this point, there's less enthusiasm with employers' support of "technical vitality," which the IEEE interprets as the ability to stay current, and with clear advancement opportunities. Admittedly, that's tough for older engineers who also are less likely to be looking for another job, even if they're dissatisfied with their current one.
The world view has also changed for some. "Everything used to be very U.S.-centric," says Vic Kulkarni, president and CEO of Sequence Design. "Now, there's the globalization of R&D and the Internet." Kulkarni, who spent time at National Semiconductor, Fairchild, CrossCheck, and Avant!, says he also sees more project flow management than he did not too many years ago.
Clear distinctions exist between the EEs of the Baby Boomer and GenX generations. They have different approaches to the work and different expectations of their employer. But more important is what they have in common—the creative fervor and dogged persistence to create exciting technology and find innovative solutions.
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