Smaller companies usually can't afford to send their people to school for an MBA or to an extended executive training course at Harvard, Yale, or the Wharton School. But, says Gauff, more people are paying for this training themselves because they recognize the need for it.
It gets tricky when a company identifies a particularly talented technical person and wants to keep him or her on a technical track. Companies tend to find it difficult to properly reward those people and have them feel that they're playing a role equal to others who are rising through the management ranks.
"Compensation systems often don't recognize the difference between the very talented technical people and those identified as having strong management potential on the business side," notes Gauff.
Ellen Stuhlmann, the managing director of ExecuNet, an online executive search group, offers several suggestions for executives looking for a job. One is to enhance your visibility. "Contact your industry association and volunteer to help by joining a committee or work on a special event," she says.
Also, if you don't already have a list of networking contacts, make one. Revisit it once a month to add new contacts and update existing contacts. Revamp your resume as well. "Chances are there's room for improvement," says Stuhlmann.
To help expedite the search for a new job, many online job boards have been revamped to offer more features, promote networking, and encourage community building. "Online Job Resources Add New Features" (Drill Deeper 5852) provides a list of the more widely consulted online job sites in the industry and some of their new tools and resources that help make for more-effective job hunting.
AN AGE-OLD ISSUE
Age discrimination is another problem that pops up every several years in the industry, although some engineers believe it's been ongoing. According to EPCGlobal, an online staffing firm specializing in engineers and construction professionals, job competition and concerns over age discrimination have resulted in some job candidates removing dates and work experience from their resumes.
"I do believe that some candidates omit dates [from their resumes] so they won't be seen as too old or overqualified," says Robin Wappler, EPCGlobal's Houston operations manager. "In some situations, the information they're leaving out could stop them from landing interviews and selling themselves into the client's environment."
Results of a survey conducted by HotJobs, the online job board, indicate that 63% of job seekers leave a date off their resumes to hide their age. Wappler says a candidate should never lie on a resume. However, there's no problem with listing college degrees without years of graduation.
Longer-term, the picture doesn't seem to improve: "The future of engineering in the U.S. may be in jeopardy," says Richard J. Noeth, director of ACT's Office of Policy Research. Noeth co-wrote a report that analyzed 12 years of data obtained from roughly 750,000 students who indicated their plans to major in an engineering field upon college entrance. Among the more than 1.1 million seniors in the class of 2002 who took the ACT Assessment college entrance and placement exam, fewer than 6% planned to study engineering in college, down from a high of nearly 9% in 1992.
The study also found that among the potential engineering majors in the class of 2002, one out of 10 had taken no more than basic mathematics courses in high school, and just over half had taken calculus. This doesn't bode well for the industry, especially if there is a job boom down the road. Will the technical talent be there when it's needed? No one knows, of course, but the industry has always had a way of righting itself, even from the worst of times.