The outlook for EE grads is a mixture – a tough economy combined with a market that still seeks qualified engineers as business looks toward an upswing. The jobs are there, but so is the competition, according to the Summer 2002 issue of Salary Survey, a quarterly report published by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE, Bethlehem, PA).

People – even highly skilled technical people – can no longer be sure they’ll have a job before graduation. And prospective grads who do have job offers are finding that the pay they can expect is lower than a few years ago, the report continues.

“We’re seeing reduced demand from employers and increased competition among job-seekers, translating into lower starting salaries,” agrees Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director. “This year a lot of disciplines have lost ground, and those that have made gains have, for the most part, posted very small increases.”

Specifically, the average offer to EE grads fell 3.4 percent. But $50,123 is still a pretty nice starting salary.

Demand continues
On the bright side, there’s still a good demand for talented EEs. Many company recruiters we spoke with for this article still have them at the top of their lists.

Vernetta Wilson, assistant manager of employment and diversity at SRI International (SRI, Menlo Park, CA), looks for people with focus, determination and enthusiasm. When she looks at your resume she wants to read about school projects, membership in organizations and company tours.

The most successful engineers at SRI, she notes, are go-getters and team players. “Their attitude is ‘Give it to me and I’ll do it.’”

To prepare this article, Diversity/ Careers interviewed EEs who graduated a year or two ago. In most cases their job searching was done when employment skies were sunnier. Most of them had several offers to choose from.

But although the job search is a bit more stringent now, the parameters are the same. In most cases it’s the enthusiastic seniors who have good EE credentials and do early and strategic career planning who have the best shot at getting the jobs.

MSEE Purnima Naganathan likes Seagate. “It’s a neat place to be because of its cutting-edge technology.

Purnima Naganathan: advisory development at Seagate
Purnima Naganathan earned a BS in electronic and communication engineering at the PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore in southern India in 2000, then came to the U.S. for her MSEE at California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA). She graduated in June 2001 and started at storage specialist Seagate (Longmont, CO) two months later.

She’d been looking for a job where she could expand the areas she’d focused on in school: digital signal processing and error control coding. “Seagate is a place where I can use both my areas of specialization,” she explains. “And I thought it would be a neat place to be, because of its cutting-edge technology.”

She joined Seagate as an advisory development engineer, a typical entry-level position for MS grads. She joined a group that designs communication channels for hard disks. Her new colleagues ranged from recent grads like herself to people with five, ten or fifteen years of experience.

When she arrived, Seagate teamed her with a mentor who spent several months “bringing me up to speed.” Now she’s well beyond that stage. “I am definitely out of the learning phase,” she says. “I am pretty much independent.”

Naganathan is a VP of the company-sponsored Toastmasters Club at Seagate, a member of the company’s Colorado Diversity Action Council and secretary of the Denver chapter of the IEEE’s Signal Processing Society. She recently completed a course in leadership and management at the University of Colorado-Boulder. And she’s a volunteer driver for the local Meals on Wheels.

Naganathan had thought about going right on with her PhD after completing her masters, but, “I wanted to take a break from school and learn the business of how products are made and sold,” she says. “I’m constantly learning. Some people here have been in the industry for fifteen or twenty years, and they say they’re still learning every day.”

Through a job rotation program, Jason Seitz made important contacts both inside and outside NSC.

Jason Seitz explores his options at National Semiconductor
Jason Seitz earned his BSEE at the University of California-Davis in 2001, specializing in analog/digital circuit theory. He began his job interviews the fall before he graduated. He intended to go on for a masters eventually, but in the meantime he wanted to work and explore his options, so he looked for a job with as much flexibility as possible.

When he interviewed with National Semiconductor (NSC, Santa Clara, CA) he felt he had reached his goal. The company encourages continuing education and wants its employees to seek the career direction that best suits them. Seitz was also impressed by the company’s “family dynamic”: he met his future co-workers during his interview, and everyone treated him as if he was already a member of the team.

Seitz signed on with NSC. His eventual job was with the Worldwide Quality Network as a customer quality engineer assigned to Hewlett-Packard/Compaq and Agilent Technologies accounts.

But first he spent a year in a rotation program that took him through different sections of his new organization. The quality network has about 350 people in all its manufacturing, test and assembly facilities, and Seitz met most of them as he moved through reliability, failure analysis and QA.

Through the rotations, Seitz made important contacts both inside and outside the company. As he settles down to work as a customer quality engineer, he expects to meet up with many of them on a day-to-day basis.

Seitz has had mentors right from the start: an HQ mentor and a local one at each rotation. They are especially helpful, he says, about things he might not want to discuss with his actual boss.

He’s part of a team of recent college hires throughout the company – a real support network, he says. And company-sponsored classes in communication and public speaking are giving him the chance to sharpen his technical skills and learn new social and networking skills.

His advice to other new grads is to look for a company that offers this kind of variety. “You don’t want to pigeonhole yourself,” he warns.

Michelle Delplanche is a software engineer at SRI International, a nonprofit with a really interesting agenda.

Michelle Delplanche: research at SRI
Michelle Delplanche is a software engineer at SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA), a nonprofit research organization. On the job she does a variety of tasks, mostly related to RF signal analysis on radar and satellites. She also works on documentation, training and configuration management.

Delplanche completed her BSEE at the University of Portland (Portland, OR) in May 2001. She was a member of the school’s E-Scholars organization, interested in business as well as engineering, and she wants to go on for an MS someday. But for the present, the offer from the nonprofit was too good to resist.

She considers SRI a fascinating place to work because of its “broad charter for the discovery and application of technology for knowledge, commerce, prosperity and peace.” SRI has divisions relating to policy, engineering and systems, information, telecom, automation and more – a remarkably wide variety of opportunities for young researchers. “It’s not just specific tasks, I can go out and find my own project,” she says.

She’s part of a team of about twenty people in the communications and signals technology lab, which is part of SRI’s information, telecommunication and automation division. She’s the only female engineer of the twenty, and one of just a few in the entire division.

Delplanche was first drawn to engineering because it seemed to be a great challenge. “I felt getting a degree in engineering would be the hardest thing I could do!” In particular, she says, “I wanted to know how computers worked.”

An open mind is the most important attribute for a new job hunter, Delplanche firmly believes. “There are many fields in electrical engineering and you might not know what you’d really like until you get into the industry.”

Lt Tung Ly is a section chief responsible for all electronics installed in the Coast Guard’s Pacific ships.

Lt Tung Ly: tech and ops work with the U.S. Coast Guard
Lt Tung Ly completed his MSEE last year, but he’d begun his technical career years ago. Starting in 1986, he got some experience as a reservist in the U.S. Army, which trained him to be a generator mechanic. He earned his BSEE at Virginia Technical College (Blackspur, VA) in December 1991. Then he joined the U.S. Coast Guard.

An EE who wants a civilian job with the Coast Guard needs considerable technical experience and preferably a masters degree. The alternative is to join the Coast Guard itself. That was Ly’s choice.

The Guard sent him to Officer Candidate School in Yorktown, VA. Then he was assigned to head up the vessel traffic center in San Francisco, CA, which was upgrading radar equipment, both hardware and software. This was a hot assignment at the time, following the environmentally disastrous Exxon Valdez accident off the coast of Alaska.

After three years Ly was moved to a search-and-rescue unit. He was in charge of taking emergency calls and coordinating the efforts of three patrol boats. The idea of a hands-on assignment like this was to make sure Coast Guard engineers understand the operational side of their work and get a broad background of experience.

In 1999 Ly was sent to the Navy’s postgrad school in Monterey, CA for his MSEE. He finished in 2001, and now he’s back to work. In the shipboard section of the Pacific maintenance command, he’s responsible for all electronics installed in the Coast Guard’s Pacific ships. Recently, for example, he had to locate suitable satellite communication equipment for an icebreaker.

As a grad student Ly focused on embedded controllers and computers, but now he’s spending more time on satellites and radios. “Shipboard systems are very complicated and need high reliability,” he notes. His work often boils down to finding the proper equipment and making sure that it’s installed correctly.

Ly enjoys the variety of his changing assignments, and he likes the hands-on ops work. “It depends on what someone wants,” he says. “If you want exclusively technical work you should go the civilian route at the Coast Guard.”

Diana Borders writes embedded software to optimize operation and print quality of Lexmark laser printers.

Diana Borders does image processing at Lexmark
Diana Borders received her BSEE from the University of Louisville (Louisville, KY) in 1997 and got her MSEE there in 1999. She spent practically the entire spring semester of 1999 interviewing for jobs, she says.

She looked at jobs in Kentucky and neighboring states. She had specialized in computer vision and image processing and wanted to find work either in imaging or computers.

Lexmark (Lexington, KY) had what she wanted. She joined its Printing Solutions and Services Division, writing embedded firmware for laser printers. She’s responsible for the software engine of Lexmark laser printers, making sure all parts are working properly for optimum print quality.

“I think I’m headed in the right direction,” Borders says. “I’m still not sure if I want to work in image processing forever, but if I want a change I can always look farther within Lexmark.”

Four co-ops at IBM in Austin, TX prepared Borders for the working world and gave her a chance to explore her areas of interest. “You need to start thinking about grades and co-ops long before graduation,” she says. “A lot of companies have a cutoff for GPA on a resume and throw out the ones with lower averages.”

At Qualcomm, Nada Tomic works in verification, integration and digital design of motherboards and hardware.

Nada Tomic supports ASIC design at Qualcomm
In May 2000, Nada Tomic completed both her BSEE at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA) and her BA at Emory University (Atlanta, GA).

Tomic had planned ahead. She went looking early, and received a job offer from Qualcomm (Santa Clara, CA) in November 1999. That gave her the spring term to prepare herself “by selecting courses I would need in my new role.”

She’s working in verification, integration and digital design of Subscriber Unit Reference (SURF) motherboards and accompanying hardware. SURF provides a hardware platform to test and support various aspects of Qualcomm’s ASIC design.

She uses a lot of what she studied in school in her everyday work, from digital and analog design courses to computer science. “And I find my business work particularly useful in managing teams, handling problems and communicating effectively,” she says. Her strongest subject in school was analog design, “but now I’m doing a lot of digital design and I’ve come to enjoy it.”

Tomic advises EE students to pick a concentration that they enjoy and search for a job based on that concentration. “After all, who wants to work eight or more hours a day doing something they’re not interested in?” she says.

Moving along
A solid foundation of technical skills is just the beginning, says Chris Flor, university recruiter at NSC. Strong communication skills and effective team participation are also key. NSC, like many other companies, has specific programs in place to help new grads find their niche and build a career.

At NSC it’s the College Club, sponsored by the university recruiting team. College Club includes barbecues, movie nights and a miniature golf tournament where new recruits get to know one another outside work. There’s also an e-mail list to match up people looking for roommates, furniture or cars.

Many companies also offer tuition reimbursement for new hires who want to continue their educations or learn specific skills. At NSC, “They can take some courses on site in Santa Clara at National Semiconductor University,” says Flor.

D/C

– Claire Swedberg is a freelance writer who lives in Somerset, NJ.