evaluating your next employer

A job-seeker takes a look at management.

By Ronald A.L. Rorrer

With dim hopes of obtaining tenure this year, I find myself at 42 with a Ph.D., a wife, a 14-year-old son who thinks he should go to college, 19 years left on the mortgage, and the altogether real possibility of once again looking for a new position.

So what is a good job? And what is a good employer? Philosophically, we all know that it is not just high pay. A good company treats its employees with respect and remains profitable to provide one with a steady job.

What are the top employers in your state? I posed this question to one of my classes recently. Now let me just say that Colorado is not the best state in the United States for mechanical engineering employment. There is minimal manufacturing, and manufacturing tends to drive the other mechanical engineering jobs, such as design, analysis, research, and development.

We attempted to list the top five companies. At the top of the list was Ball Aerospace, which has a local reputation for both technology and being a family-oriented company, quite a feat in the aerospace business. Ball has been known for its work on the Hubble Telescope and is currently working on the James Webb Telescope.

According to engineers at Ball, the company does not tend to overhire when a new program is started, which results in fewer layoffs over time.

Students also threw out names like Coors, Lockheed Martin, Hewlett-Packard, and some of the other perennial favorites. Today, Coors outsources much of its engineering. According to a discussion on a plant tour with a senior engineer at Coors, over the last 25 years the number of internal Coors engineers has dropped by a factor of eight. Engineers still at Coors work predominantly on capital equipment projects related to brewing and bottling beer.

Several months ago, contracts for target missiles had Lockheed Martin listing approximately 75 mechanical engineering job openings locally. Now the Web site lists just 12 openings. Martin has always been one of the top-paying employers in an area, albeit with employment tied to the rise and fall of contracts.

For the first time in my career, I cannot tell you what are the best five employers of mechanical engineers in the state where I live. And, as the faculty advisor of the ASME student section at the University of Colorado at Denver, I have monitored the job market and the companies in the state very closely.

Evaluation of companies is something that you should do all the time. In the new world order, you should be able to list the companies that you would like to work for, why you would like to work for them, and the ones most likely to need you.

When evaluating a job, be sure to talk to people who work for a company about its policies.

A good company for you is one that does not just meet your need for survival (read: food and mortgage payment), but fulfills your higher needs. Don't we all want to work for a company that treats us with respect, values our contribution, and provides growth opportunities and some semblance of stable employment? You want to work for a world-class employer that treats you in a world-class manner.

How do you learn about a company? One of the best ways is to talk to people who work there. Ask them about the company's employment policies.

Newspapers will run articles about companies in their business sections. In Colorado, the Denver Post annually lists the top 100 companies ranked by corporate financial worth. Many metropolitan areas have local business journals. By monitoring local media sources over an extended period of time, you build up a much more comprehensive view of local employment opportunities and practices than you would by monitoring national or international publications.

There is useful information strewn across the Internet, but it must be used judiciously. Consider the source. You do not want to obtain all of your information from the one employee who is either disgruntled or ecstatic about the company.

Contacting the company directly often does not work. For example, I contacted Coors, Lockheed Martin, and Ball to confirm information in this article. While public relations people at each company told me they would respond, they did not.

I waited for Forbes' "100 Best Companies to Work for in America" to be published before I finished this article. More than a third, 37 companies, lost jobs in 2003. Of the 100 companies, I estimate that approximately seven employ mechanical design engineers and 15 employ manufacturing engineers in any significant numbers. High-technology engineering companies are noticeably absent from the list.

The number one company was Smuckers. Mechanical engineering would be involved in the processing and packaging of the product. And maybe engineers can sneak into the taste-testing laboratories.

Ronald A. L. Rorrer is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado at Denver.




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