Problem Statement

The job search process for college students, especially engineers, is often stressful and grueling. This claim comes from our personal experiences with job hunting as engineering students, but we reinforced it with a job search survey taken by many of our peers. Sadly from looking at the results it appears that Dean of Occupational Education at El Camino College, Ed Muraski’s words from forty years ago, “students are poorly prepared for the job application process; therefore, they lose out in the highly competitive job market even though they have excellent job skills” (Muraski) still hold true even after decades of advancements in student career services. Looking closely at the survey responses, we believe this broad issue involving the job recruitment process for engineers can be broken down into the following three problems:

1. Staying organized and keeping track of each job application the student has submitted, along with all of the necessary steps through the entire application process, is challenging. From the experiences of ourselves and our peers, we believe that during the job hunting season, many students will find themselves juggling ten or more ongoing applications each at different steps of completion.

2. Organizing the content and portfolio of an application in the best way possible is difficult. We have seen that many engineering students don’t take full advantage of the resources available to help them in their application process, especially GitHub. GitHub is an electronic service that allows students to organize and showcase their technical projects to employers. However, many students don’t truly know how to use GitHub or what the best practices are when creating a GitHub portfolio, which would be very useful for job applications.

3. There is a large sum of job specific recruitment information that is not well known by students. Looking to our own experiences, there are many mistakes we have made in our job searches that could have been avoided if we knew specific details about applying to jobs within our fields such as recruitment windows.

While many resources are available to engineering students to help assist them in their job search and application process to counteract these problems, based on our team’s experience, it is not always made clear what these resources are and how they can be used. Because of this, we have created the following user document to give clear and comprehensive assistance for each problem.

Lastly, we justified the existence of the second main problem being portfolio organization based on these initial suggestions from a 1998 paper, “Students can enhance their ability to pass the initial screening process by preparing a portfolio that identifies their goals and provides evidence that they possess the skills and qualities to reach these goals” (Powell). This paper agrees with our personal experiences with job applications and we have no reason to believe that the importance of portfolios has decreased with a job market that has become increasingly competitive for engineers with recent turmoil resulting from the pandemic (Brinkman).

To ensure we were prepared to provide solutions to these problems we engaged in a literature search to find best practices and advice for the job search. First, we found an article that highlighted the importance of meticulous preparation (Saks) and a paper that revealed insights about the best job search techniques (Faberman). Next, we read excerpts from a book detailing seven key elements to success in the engineering job search (Fasano) and a book giving practical advice for job hunters (Bolles). These gave us a good base of knowledge to work for how we could best help engineering students excel in the job market.

With these three problems outlined, we decided on three content areas to address each of them. These ended up being a Google Sheets template for keeping track of ongoing applications, a tutorial on using GitHub Pages for hosting electronic portfolios (e-portfolio), and a Google Slides slide deck containing job-area specific information.

Reading Steve Dalton’s book about using technology in the job search (Dalton), we learned that organization techniques using spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel can be highly beneficial. Google Sheets is a powerful tool when used correctly; this combined with its lack of cost compared to Excel made Sheets our best choice for the spreadsheet. However, it is easy to fall into the trap of making a spreadsheet that is significantly more complicated than it needs to be. This is the main constraint that went into creating the Job Search Organization Sheet because an over-complicated interface pushes users away and defeats the entire purpose of using an organization tool. To account for this issue, we designed the spreadsheet specifically for simplicity, with two short videos outlining the under-the-hood details that our student users may want to customize. This way, students who know how to use more tools in Google Sheets have the ability to further customize their Sheet, and less experienced students can still get the full use out of the tool. Therefore the scope of this spreadsheet is largely in the user’s control.

Using GitHub Pages for the e-portfolio tutorial had a similar rationale behind it as GitHub is both a powerful service and comes free of charge. The tutorial is targeted at individual students who are not already familiar with GitHub so that they can be eased into the process of making their e-portfolio. The scope covers making an account, making a website using a template, and uploading projects to it. We decided that e-portfolios were the best way to showcase past projects based on papers we read supporting their value (Yu) & (Weber).

The recruitment guides are tailored for undergraduate engineering students in junior and senior years. Most of the research and sources used came from the Cornell University College of Engineering community therefore these guides are most useful to this particular group. Nonetheless, any undergraduate student at any university could find these recruitment guides useful. Furthermore, we choose to make the guides on Google Slides so that this resource can be easily accessed, shared, and updated at no cost.

Combined, the three tools outlined on this webpage will work together to help students complete their job searches during a historically difficult employment climate. “COVID-19 has prompted a global sense of uncertainty [in the job market]” (Hite and McDonald, 2020). For this reason, we are confident that the tools we have diligently worked to iterate and finalize will significantly help students find job opportunities effectively in these uncertain times.

Throughout this resource, we have outlined a significant need of engineering students for more resources to aid their job searching processes. We found evidence from papers, our personal experiences, and a survey of our peers to justify the existence of this issue and to furthermore divide it into three key problems to be resolved. First, we addressed the poor organization of applications of students by developing an interactive Google Sheets spreadsheet template to allow better management of ongoing applications. Next, we addressed struggles with putting together portfolios by writing a beginner oriented tutorial on using GitHub Pages to host an e-portfolio to showcase a student’s important projects. And finally, we addressed the lack of job-specific application and recruitment information by making a series of guides for various fields using Google Slides.

Through prototyping our tools to address these issues combined with incorporating tester feedback, we have created a comprehensive user document we can be proud of. We are content with the quality of this guide and hope it will prove to be very useful for future students pursuing jobs. Furthermore, we will continue trying to improve this resource by iterating based on feedback we receive. We would really appreciate it if you were to contribute to this feedback by following this link.

We hope this document was able to help you with your job search. Thank you for reading!