I just came across this brief article from Plant Services entitled “Report Warns that Global Skilled Trade Shortage Could Stall Future Economic Growth” that provides some highlights from Manpower’s recent study  “Strategic Migration — a Short-Term Solution to the Skilled Trades Shortage”. I haven’t had the opportunity to review the report yet, but as those of us who follow employment trends in reliability engineering and industrial maintenance know, finding skilled talent, be it the trades or for predictive maintenance and reliability engineering professionals has been increasingly challenging.

While hiring hasn’t been as robust as one would hope, we have seen a fair amount of recent activity here on the NextUp Careers job board.  Likewise, The Reliability Talent Group, which provides recruitment services for reliability engineers, predictive maintenance professionals has some a fair amount of new requests for assistance in finding key positions.  Particularly hot are positions such as maintenance managers and reliability engineers.  The good news is that the requests are coming from all types of industries and not just one, so hopefully its an indication that this recovery is a broad based one.

Recent Study Shows Employers Favor those with State University Education

I recently came across an article in the Wall Street Journal that relates education with the specialized fields of reliability engineering and predictive maintenance.

Did you know that those of us in the predictive maintenance and reliability engineering fields have a better chance of being hired if we attended a state university? It may sound bizarre, but it’s true.

The article, by Jennifer Merrit states that U.S. companies favor graduates from big state universities over Ivy Leauge and elite liberal art schools when weeding through the pool of applicants for a perspective employee.

The study was performed by the Wall Street Journal and surveyed 479 of the largest public and private companies, including nonprofits and government agencies.

The study found a definite split in perception regarding state and private schools. Logic has always told us that elite is better, Ivy League is best. The study proves that this isn’t always true, and in fact, it’s quite the opposite for those in fields such as reliability engineering and predictive maintenance.  

Recruiters stated that when it came to intellect, cachet and “soft-skills’ like interpersonal skills, communication and critical thinking, they chose the elite, smaller, private schools. For jobs that required practical skills and technical expertise, such as operations mangers, product developers, business analysts, and engineers (think maintenance engineers, facility engineers, mechanical engineers, and reliability engineers) recruiters favored the larger state universities.

The survey asked recruiters to rank the top 25 schools they favor applicants from and 19 of them were public, one was Ivy League and the rest were private.

The article emphasizes the point that the job hunt for skilled professionals isn’t necessarily fair.  Although a recruiter’s perception may be biased, they often make choices based upon them.

You may be in luck if you earned a degree from one of the top picks – Pennsylvania State University, Texas A&M University, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Applicants with these colleges on their resume were highly favored.  If you are considering taking college courses to enhance your skills in a specific field such as vibration analysis, infrared thermography, or reliability engineering, remember that a school with prestige and clout doesn’t always equate to a better education.  

Despite if you went to a large state university or a small elite liberal arts school – the fact still remains; those with a solid education are faring better in this recession than those without. While the unemployment rate for those without a college degree was 10.3% in August, it’s alarmingly smaller for those with a college degree at 4.6%.

Blog.Indeed has reported that job postings online have reached their highest levels of 2010 in August. In their Industry Employment Trends report, which tests the climate of 12 major industries and their job postings, it is reported that year-over-year job posting growth occurred in all 12 industries in August.

 Manufacturing showed an upswing with a 67% increase in job postings year-over-year for the month of August. This was 20% more job postings than the month before.

In our last blog post we spoke about the strong labor shortage across the reliability engineering and predictive maintenance industries. The demand for reliability engineers with advanced skills is clear, but what does that mean for you as a job seeker? The higher the demand for specialized positions, the higher amount of job postings you will run into.  

For those of us in the reliability engineering/predictive maintenance and industrial maintenance industry —these job postings compiled from our searches may be overwhelming.  The increase in demand for highly skilled individuals has created a sea of job postings that can often times be confusing.  Not only can your search be overwhelming – it can also be dangerous.

Many scammers have taken advantage of this influx of job postings to mask fraud with what looks like a lucrative position. Some job postings for specific positions such as vibration analysts, infrared thermographers, and maintenance mangers may seem to be honest leads, but you may find that some aren’t. The article, Job Fraud: Five Ways to Make Sure that Online Job Offer Isn’t a Scam, by Aaron Crowe, determines a set of guidelines to determine if you’re on the right foot with your job hunting.

Below are some excerpts from the article by Crowe that cover the highlights of the article, and may help you determine if the job posting you are viewing is fraudulent:

1. Too much information requested.

“The website asks for your personal information, such as Social Security or driver’s license number. While legitimate companies do this, it’s best to avoid providing such private information so early in the application process and give it later in a direct e-mail from someone you know and trust than from a website you don’t know much about.”

2. Many enticements seemingly too good to be true

“Casting a wider net will get phishers more responses, so they try to entice as many people as they can to their fake job offers with many terms on Craigslist or elsewhere, such as:

• “Telecommuting is OK” or “Can work from home” appeals to many people.
• Vague job titles such as customer service rep to get job seekers to click for more information.
• High hourly wages that seem too good to be true and are specific, such as $32.32 per hour.
• “No experience necessary” but a promise of high pay. When has that been true for a legitimate job?”

3. You Find grammatical and spelling errors.

“People outside of the United States whose first language isn’t English often perpetrate online fraud, and common words on their websites or in e-mails will be misspelled or they’ll have poor use of grammar.”

4. There are bad links

“If a job application doesn’t pop up online within the second link, you’re being sent through job applicant hell and rerouted to places you don’t want to be. If you’re redirected to another site, it’s another chance for a virus to invade your computer, and another chance for the fake company to try to get your personal information.

Bad links could include sending you to a job membership site that asks for more information, a link to a home business or multi-level marketing opportunity, and endless links to more websites that promise you more job offers but don’t deliver.”

5. The E-mail responses you receive don’t add up

“An automated e-mail response after filing for a job online is normal. But an automatic response that asks you to send in money or personal information so the “company” can do an immediate background check is not. If someone from a foreign country asks you to handle accounts payable and receivables from home, it’s a laundering scam. If you keep e-mailing the company and only get auto responses, there’s not a real person at the other end and it’s a scam.”

(Job Fraud: Five Ways to Make Sure that Online Job Offer Isn’t a Scam, Aaron Crowe, 9/10/10)

Another great way to avoid searching through fraudulent or irrelevant job postings in the reliability engineering and predictive and industrial maintenance fields is to create an account with NextUp Careers. When you create an account you will have the ability to create custom searches, save targeted jobs and present prospective employers with the opportunity to view your resume, providing you with more job opportunities. Our confidential notification system allows you to pursue only the opportunities of interest to you. Give it a try!

We came across an post entitled “Future Hiring Will Mainly Benefit the Highly Skilled” and thought it had some interesting points for those of us in reliability engineering/predictive maintenance and industrial maintenance industry to consider.

The primary point of the article is that there is going to be demand for two types of jobs in the coming years – the highly skilled/educated and the lower end, lower paying positions – the classic McJobs.  Getting squeezed will be the middle service jobs as more and more of these tasks can be automated and/or outsourced.  Assuming this opinion is correct, I think we can state that the demand for reliability engineers and other highly skilled maintenance professionals as well as the entry level craft skill positions will be in strong demand.

In general, I’m in agreement with this worldview, but I do wonder how it will impact the industrial maintenance industry.  As many who read this blog and who are active in the industry know, we are facing a strong labor shortage across the spectrum of expertise.  Given this, should we expect this macro trend to impact our industry, or will hiring for all types of maintenance professionals remain strong because of the supply/demand imbalance.  At the moment, I’m undecided but I’m leaning towards believing that the reliability engineering and predictive maintenance industry will follow this trend.

At the top end we know the demand for reliability engineers who have advanced skills and capabilities will continue; we see it constantly in our job postings and in the recruitment requests that we get.  We also know that the demand for those on the lower end of the spectrum is high and currently we know there is strong demand for the middle range – what I guess we can classify as our Level I and Level II technicians.  However, I can see that abating as equipment technology comes down in price and the on-demand analytics become better. This will make it easier for companies to get more out of their lower tiers of talent. While they will pay more for this level it will probably make more economic sense to hire and train from the bottom up than try to build and maintain the middle level of reliability engineers and predictive maintenance technicians.

What do you think?

If you’re like us, you’ve been bombarded with articles and blog posts and e-mail alerts claiming that a recent Administrator’s Interpretation issued by the Department of Labor has greatly expanded the class of people who are allowed to take FMLA leave to care for a child. These articles, including the DOL’s June 22, 2010 press release, suggest that employees who care for a child as a parent are now entitled FMLA leave even if that employee has no biological or legal relationship to the child – as if that hasn’t already been the case for the last 15 years.

The fact is that since the DOL issued its FMLA regulations in April 1995, it has been clear that individuals who stand in loco parentis (Latin for “in the place of a parent”) to a child are entitled to FMLA leave regardless of any biological or legal relationship to the child. Indeed, the regulations issued in 1995 explicitly define “parent” as “a biological parent or an individual who stands or stood in loco parentis…” and define “son or daughter” as “a biological, adopted, or foster child, a stepchild, a legal ward, or a child of a person standing in loco parentis…” The regulations go on to clarify the meaning of in loco parentis:

Persons who are “in loco parentis“include those with day-to-day responsibilities to care for and financially support a child or, in the case of an employee, who had such responsibility for the employee when the employee was a child. A biological or legal relationship is not necessary.

So, since 1995, it has been more than clear that a biological or legal relationship to a child was not necessary in order to take FMLA leave for that child. Why the DOL is issuing a press release with the tag line “Interpretation is a win for all families no matter what they look like” is beyond me. The only thing I can think of is that, since the current administration has been a large disappointment to the LGBT community who hoped to have seen by now the end of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and the elimination of the Defense of Marriage Act, the DOL is issuing press releases like this one to make it look like the government has actually accomplished something for nontraditional families.

The DOL’s Administrator Opinion did make one change to the FMLA regulations, however – the opinion stated that where the regulations state that in loco parentis individuals include “those with day-to-day responsibilities to care for and financially support a child,” this is to be interpreted as including “individuals with day-to-day responsibilities to care for a child” and “individuals with day-to-day responsibilities to financially support a child.” In other words, one individual does not need to both care for and financially support a child in order to stand in loco parentis – doing either will suffice. So perhaps technically the group of people who are entitled FMLA has been expanded a tiny bit, but certainly not as much as all the recent hype suggests, and certainly not enough for the DOL to go around slapping itself on the back and blowing its horn about how much they’re doing for nontraditional families.

Summer is unofficially over. Labor Day has marked the end of summer, wearing white pants, and your summer hiatus from finding the perfect reliability engineering or predictive maintenance job.

Take this Tuesday to remind yourself that you have the skills needed; it’s just a matter of finding the right fit. Here at NextUp Careers we pride ourselves in finding you, the professional, the perfect fit for a job. Whether you are a reliability engineer, a vibrational analyst, infrared thermographer or a predictive maintenance manager, we can help you.

As we continue to build out our resume database and job postings for reliability engineering and predictive maintenance jobs we need highly-talented individuals to fill the positions. Please take a moment and submit your resume. It may be daunting jumping back into the swing of job hunting but don’t fret; you will know how well a job opportunity fits you just by uploading your resume into our system.

You’ve had your summer of relaxation, now it’s time to get a kick start on finding the job that’s right for you.

One of the most harrowing times as a job hunter is the period after you’ve submitted your resume. You anxiously check your e-mail, watch your phone, and stay alert for a response. Other than that, what can you do?

I found an article written by Lisa Vass from the Ladders, How to Follow Up a Resume Submission, that gives from great tips for following up after you’ve submitted a resume. Although the article isn’t targeted specifically for reliability engineers and predictive maintenance professionals, it is still has some great tips for your job hunt and resume strategies.

The article highlights the importance of staying on top of your resume and application during your job hunt – and specifically this applies to highly competitive positions in the reliability engineering and predictive maintenance fields. A phone call following up puts your name out there for the employer to remember.

There is a fine line between being pesky and being persistent. The article highlights the following tips to strike the right balance for your follow-up actions after you’ve submitted a resume.

1.)    Keep an eye on the “close date” of the job search. Most likely the individual filling the position has a ton of resumes coming in so don’t call before the close date. Rather than reaching for the phone immediately, wait about a week after the close date to let the dust settle. Five business days is the minimum you should wait before placing a phone call to follow up on your resume.

2.)    When you do follow up, know what questions to ask. Your questions shouldn’t be intrusive but could include: Have any decision been made yet? Is it OK to follow up again? What’s the time frame for the hiring process?

3.)    Don’t be annoying! If the job posting asks for no phone calls, then don’t call. The article also recommends that you don’t make more than one phone call – although you may be tempted to.

We blog often on resume tips for reliability engineers and predictive maintenance professionals. Check out this blog entry on tips to refresh your resume.

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past ten years, chances are you have been on the web. Like any other web-savvy person, you’ve probably been joining social networking sites, writing blogs, surfing job postings, tweeting on Twitter, and posting pictures.

Staying connected is great. I started wondering though, how far back does this monolithic stockpile of information go on the internet? The answer is pretty far. You may have forgotten the pictures you posted from your years in college, the scathing article you wrote on healthcare reform, or the off-color joke you posted on your friend’s Facebook wall, but the internet hasn’t. The internet is not only a great tool for job searching – it’s a great tool for employers do to a little digging on you.

On our sister company, Hire EQ, there is a blog post regarding employers who are adding background checking via social networking sites to their recruitment process for open jobs.

If your web trail is expansive it’s a good idea to do some cleaning up before applying for highly-sought after positions. When competition is stiff employers use all resources available to them, including social networking sites, to weed out applicants. Although the practice of digging up information on prospective employees is ethically questionable (and often frowned upon) it’s still done.

It’s simple to do some light clean-up of your history and presence on the web. Before you delve into researching yourself get into the mindset of a recruiter or an employer and ask yourself what they would want to see on the internet about a prospective employee.

Here are some tips to get you started:

1. Go ahead – Google yourself.

OK. So no one wants to admit they have ‘Googled’ themselves but it’s an important step in cleaning up your web trail. You never know what could turn up. For example, photo hosting sites such as Flicker and Photobucket keep images on file for an eternity, even if an account isn’t active.  Flicker, Photobucket, and YouTube make it easy to search for names in tags of photos so do a little research. Blogs also offer a wealth of information and are littered with name dropping. Your search may not turn up something you posted, you could find something someone else posted about you.  If you have a Twitter account you’d be amazed at how easily you can find old tweets and photos, so be sure you check all privacy settings.  Lastly, don’t be slack in your sleuthing. Be sure that you go beyond just the first few pages of Google results to find any information listed about you.  

1. Ensure that your LinkedIn Profile is up-to-date and accurate.

LinkedIn is a wonderful place for employers to find well qualified individuals like you who are in the preventative maintenance and reliability engineering fields. Part of making yourself available to prospective employers is ensuring that you’ve selected “Contact Me” in your options settings. If you aren’t available to be contacted recruiters will pass you by. Also, it’s important to list all of your work history, achievements, and accolades including keywords that will make your profile appear in more search engines. Accuracy is also important – be sure that all of your previous work history is represented accurately and fairly.

1. Separate your personal and professional life on Facebook

Having a personal Facebook page is fine, but be sure to set your privacy settings correctly.  This includes not only who can view your profile, but who can view your photos, friend lists, and wall posts. It is possible for a prospective employee to view pictures tagged of you in an album that hasn’t been properly protected for privacy. Keeping this in mind, weed out any images you are tagged in that are unflattening and keep your wall posts in good taste. Also, be sure that if your Facebook page is personal and that you keep it personal. Avoid accepting friend invitations from people you may not know, coworkers, bosses, etc.

 If you clean up your web trail you will make the available information about you more accurate. Making yourself more appealing to an employer is key, so check your web presence often. And remember, anything you put on the internet will most likely be seen.