subject: Where are the Engineering Jobs? [print this page] Where are the Engineering Jobs? Where are the Engineering Jobs?
The engineering professions have been hard hit by the recession; especially Civil Engineering. If you are an engineer seeking employment, you probably have noticed that job postings in the classified advertisements for your profession are rare. But believe it or not there a few companies out there who are looking for your expertise.
Clicking through the various sites on the internet you will notice that there just are not the job postings there once was. In my state of Nevada it is extremely hard to find any postings, but other states like California and Texas the postings are much better.
If we break-up the United States into the 5 basic geographic areas; Northwest, Mid-west, Northeast, Southeast and Southwest, which area would fair better on new job postings for Civil Engineers? In order to answer this question, we decided to look at several of the main online job listing sites, and categorize the listings as follows: the number of civil engineering job postings, number jobs in geographical areas, and the states with the highest number of job postings.
A surprising result was found after analyzing several sites. The first thing that stood out was that the number of postings was very low. States like Rhode Island and South Dakota would consistently show zero to extremely low number of listings. Several other States like Delaware, Kentucky, North Dakota, and West Virginia would only show one or two listings.
The other pattern showed that the highest number of job postings constantly were in the southwest region. In each analysis California's and Texas's high job postings carried the southwest region to the lead.
1. Southwest Region According to the various websites, this region had the highest number of job postings. About 70% of those postings were found in California and Texas.
2. Southeast Region This region ran a close second to the Southwest region's job posting numbers. The number of job postings seemed to be a little more spread across the States in this region. Florida, Virginia, and Washington DC area typically had the highest number of postings.
3. Northeast Region The states of New Jersey, Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania typical had the highest job postings in this region, but Rhode Island and Vermont were usually the lowest.
4. Mid West Region This region has the most number of states, and consistently showed very low job postings. On average Illinois's and Ohio's posting numbers were about half the regions total number of postings.
5. Northwest Region This region showed the lowest number of job postings on all of the websites we reviewed. With about 70% of the job postings the State of Washington had the highest number of postings in this region.
What does the results of this survey mean to you? The country is still trying to recover from the recession, and from what we can gather from our review many engineering companies are not hiring. The best place to look for a Civil Engineering job right now is probably California, Florida, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas or the Washington DC area. Due to the low job posting numbers on the websites, obtaining employment in any other State would be extremely difficult.
