The Reliability Talent Group is pleased to announce that nextupcareers.com its career site dedicated to serving the reliability engineering, predictive and industrial maintenance community is now offering free job postings and a new suite of promotional services.

As Michael Vann, one of the Group’s principals noted, moving to a free posting model wasn’t a difficult decision.  “We started the site because we felt that there was a real need in the industry for career/employment related resources.  Our job board was designed as a way to introduce opportunities to candidates and employers alike.  We have been watching the job board business model evolve and we felt like free was the best way to deliver value to the reliability community”.

In addition to providing a free job board, nextupcareers.com provides a tremendous amount of resources for reliability engineers and industrial maintenance professionals.  This includes a comprehensive events calendar, industry links, and blogs from career and employment professionals.

Along with the free posts, Vann also announced that nextupcareers.com will be offering a new suite of promotional services.  As Vann noted, “we recognize that its hard for companies to stand out and communicate their employment value proposition.  To help companies get that message out, we have developed some great services like a branded career page/job board, custom email blasts and custom produced articles and posts”.

About the Reliability Talent Group

The Reliabilty Talent Group provides employee-sourcing solutions to companies that hire reliability engineers, predictive maintenance and industrial maintenance professionals.  In addition to hosting nextupcareers.com, the first career portal dedicated to the industry, the Group offers a complete recruitment and temporary staffing service solution that delivers quality candidates in a timely and affordable manner. You can contact the Reliability Talent Group at info@nextupcareers.com or at 413-543-2944

We came across an article the other day on msnbc.com that we thought was particularly relevant to the reliability engineering and industrial maintenance community.  Entitled, Need a Job? Contract Work Could Become Normal” the article discusses how more companies are utilizing freelancers instead of full-time employees.  As the story indicates, in some cases companies are actually laying off employees and bringing them back as freelancers to perform the same job, but for less money and no benefits.

The reliability and maintenance industry has long had its fair share of independent contractors, as outsourcing predictive maintenance services to companies like IVC Technologies or the Snell Group have been commonplace.  Likewise, when specific reliability engineering expertise has been required, companies like Allied Reliability, Lifecycle Engineering and MRG have often received the call and delivered this expertise on a consulting basis.

However, what this article seems to suggest is that companies may begin to bypass these outsourced service providers and contract directly with individuals.  As the post notes, a study published last year found:

“50% of new jobs that emerge after the recession will be contingent positions, and as a result “as high as 35% of the work force will be made up of temporary workers, contractors or other project-based labor.”

From our industry perspective, we see this trend impacting reliability engineers more than predictive maintenance or general maintenance positions because those employees who perform activities like RCM or planning/scheduling are generally self directed whereas predictive maintenance technicians and similar positions are managed.  Going forward this will be an important distinction because of labor classification issues.

As to whether or not this trend is beneficial is debatable.  There are some wonderful benefits of being a freelancer as the flexibility and freedom to pursue what you want to pursue is very appealing.  However, the loss of benefits and security are major concerns, particularly if you are an individual who may not have the best sales/marketing skills.  Creating a personal brand is going to become more and more important in this environment.  Likewise, we imagine that if the freelance trend does continue there will need to be a change in the traditional benefit model.

There are lots of questions that still need to be answered about this evolving workforce model. One thing that is clear is that this transition is going to be difficult and will likely have some unintended consequences that advocates of flexible workforces may not particularly enjoy.  Such is the march of progress.  We are curious to see if this trend is impacting our industry yet.  If you have a story or an example of the freelance model in action, let us know.

There is a rapidly growing community of reliability engineering, predictive and industrial maintenance professionals utilizing Twitter.  NextUp Careers is active on Twitter (follow us) as are many other companies and industry leaders.  We follow a number of people, including Terry O’Hanlon from Reliability Web, Shon Isonhour of ABB and Ricky Smith of GPAllied. Those participating in the twitter reliability community provide lots of great information on the latest trends, news stories and insights/analysis of interesting maintenance and reliability topics. And, yes there are job postings on the Twitter Feed.  We publish ours and Daryl Mather of Reliability Success has a constant feed of job postings that are aggregated from Simply Hired.

So, with all of the resources out there, how does a reliability engineer or other industrial maintenance professional utilize Twitter for getting engaged and finding jobs? First and foremost, you need to get an account which is real easy to do, just go to Twitter and sign up.  Secondly, find the profiles of NextUp Careers and the other reliability professionals that we identified and follow them.  Then, start to go through their profiles and see who they are following and follow the ones that look interesting to you.  Within Twitter you can also search for specific topics by using a # mark.  As an example, search #reliability and you can find people talking about those topics.

Once you’ve found people to follow, go ahead and start to post updates to your profile.  Use the # when you are targeting specific topics so they can be found and don’t be afraid to retweet (RT) what other people are saying.  This will get you involved in the community and as you do this, you should also start to direct message (DM) people who have interesting things to say and start a dialogue with them, introducing yourself and your talents to them.

It really is that easy to get started on Twitter and if you do it right, it doesn’t take a lot of time to do.  This is obviously a very brief intro on how to get started on Twitter, so I would suggest that if you are serious about using Twitter for your job search that you pick up “The Twitter Job Search Guide“.  This is a very good resource for helping you get started on Twitter and understanding how to leverage it for your job search.

If you get a chance, please share your Twitter job search stories with us.  And, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.  We can be found by clicking the links within this post or you can find us @nextupcareers