Maintaining lifelong, personal global-competitiveness

In August 2011, approximately 2.8% of US engineers and scientists were unemployed for more than 15 weeks. The corresponding percentage across all occupations was slightly over 5%. At the same time, almost 90% of recent engineering and science graduates from some top US research universities had job or school plans in place before graduation. The majority of these new-grads enter the workforce without years of industry experience. This paper presents five attributes of these new-grads that make them more hirable than some of the experienced technology workers they may be competing with. However, these attributes can be modified and adopted by the experienced workers themselves. Five actions are proposed for experienced engineers and scientists to take to recapture and maintain the global competitiveness that top US engineering and science new-grads have enjoyed, even during the recent difficult employment market.