r/ChemicalEngineering • u/DeadlyGamer2202 • 12d ago
Career Advice When was the job market good?
I’ve been asking people in industry regarding the job market situation in chemical engineering since I was in high school (2019). I am now about to graduate next year.
Throughout all those years, people have only complained about the situation.
“My company stopped hiring new grads now”
“This dude applied to 100 billion openings before landing 3 interviews and getting 1 offer”
“There’s no room for negotiation. Be grateful for the offer in this market”
This is all that I’ve heard all these years throughout my bachelors. I thought maybe by the time I graduate, things would be better. But with less than a year left, I don’t think the situation is going to change much.
This made me question. Has it really been that bad throughout these past 6 years? Am I graduating in ‘the lost decade’ or something? Or are people just complaining as usual, exaggerating the one off bad instances and downplaying the success stories?
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u/user03161 12d ago
Okay maybe this is my personal hot take but I have never struggled to find a job in chemical engineering and a lot of my peers haven’t either. I graduated in 2021 and have job hopped since then ( oops) It may take sometime but honestly have never had an issue. Here are my tips for you though:
Be willing to relocate even if it’s just for a year. Chemical engineering job locations sometimes aren’t in desirable areas but the experience you get can be unmatched. If you’re willing to relocate it’s much easier to get a job.
Show that you have extracurriculars on your resume and didn’t just spend your whole college career studying. You want a well rounded engineer at your company. That’s always helped my resume having that I was apart of different organizations. Or even now post grad I volunteer and have it on there.
Practice STAR questions even if your answers are from projects in college that’s okay. You still experience some type of conflict, leadership, problem you had to overcome etc. that you can describe to them.
Your first job out of college may suck sometimes and you may have to pay your dues. Sometimes the odd hours, the crappy projects etc. I think everyone has experienced it at some point but it comes with the territory
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u/DeadlyGamer2202 12d ago
I am not American so I didn’t know about STAR questions. I think practicing those kinda questions will help me immensely. Thank you.
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u/modcowboy 12d ago
In the US the market has been good in waves - at the onset of fracking (early 2010s) and late 90s during the dot com run up. Of course there are some times before this but anyone in the workforce likely didn’t experience those boom times.
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u/hysys_whisperer 12d ago
Most of the 2010s were actually pretty good, especially post about 2012.
IMO, the employment picture for new grads didn't really start to suck until Covid. There were a few short windows here and there where you'd see companies on hiring freezes for 6 months, bur it wasn't every company at the same time across multiple unrelated industries like it is now.
It was slowly getting better post covid, but then round about February of this year, economic activity really started to nosedive and that has put us in a worse place than 2021 in a lot of industries.
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u/DeadlyGamer2202 12d ago
Yeah recently the policies have been extremely uncertain and the companies in my country are being rather conservative with their hiring plans.
I might as well ‘wait out’ this turbulent phase by pursue a masters degree.
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u/MuddyflyWatersman 12d ago edited 12d ago
the early 90s were so good. for new employees, older people with 5 years of experience were making less money than brand new hires. companies had to give new hires encroachment raises every year to keep them. however the older employees did not get those, they got pissed, and they left. HR flat out said if you had encroachment problem after being in the job for several years, it was you. Two engineers I worked with on my first job assignment....quit.... went to work elsewhere.... because I made more money than them as a new hire. I did not even tell them how much money I made...they asked... I told them the range of my offers and that I did not accept the highest..... but my lowest....was still more than they were making with 2 to 5 years of experience.😮
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u/DeadlyGamer2202 12d ago
Well it doesn’t seem like crude oil is going to sustain prices above $100/ barrel again anytime soon.
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u/Full_Bank_6172 12d ago
Back in the 80s and early 90s the job market was fucking smoking for Chemical engineering.
And then in the early 2000s I had it drilled into my head “petrochem oil and gas if you want to make a lot of money go chemE go to oil and gas that’s where all the money is”
Then I graduated in 2016 shortly after the Iran deal was signed and fraking flooded the energy markets and there were NO FUKIN JOBS!
Luckily I knew how to write a for loop which back in 2016 was more than enough to land myself a job as a web developer. Now I work at Microsoft lol.
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u/MadDrHelix Aqua/Biz Owner > 10 years - USA 12d ago
The people who find jobs don't complain. Those with co-op/internship experience find jobs easier. Those that worked hard in school tend to find jobs easier.
Indeed "fast apply" which can allow a person to apply for 1000 jobs in a day and people aren't tailoring their resumes to the job.
I remember hearing ChemE's have a harder time than other engineers getting their first job back from 2010.
Those that treat their diploma more like a "tool in the toolbelt" instead of "my diploma is all I need and I can stop learning" will have an easier time finding jobs. A lot of what you learn in industry is only tangentially related to what you learn in school (this depends on the job, but is common for a lot of ChemEs).
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u/DeadlyGamer2202 12d ago
The kind of skillset required in chemical engineering varies so much from one company to another and from one industry to another, it’s hard to decide what exactly to learn beyond the basics like communication skills, excel and maybe aspen.
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u/brickbatsandadiabats 11d ago
Early/mid-2000s were a great time to be a ChE in O&G or petrochemicals. 2012-2016 was a great time to be a bio guy and wasn't bad at all for anyone involved in downstream; can't speak to upstream but the rig counts in those days were very high. 2019-2022 were very hot if you were involved in transportation fuel or batteries, godawful if you were in commodity petrochemicals.
It seriously varies by sector, wider trends, and even region. Investment and retrenchment follow a cyclic boom-bust cycle and a market miss in the wider economy can have serious knock-on effects. The petroleum and gas downstream industry in the Gulf Coast and NJ especially is accustomed to layoffs during busts and hiring bursts during booms, and there's a lot of active M&A in the sector that provides a background of cost-cutting activity as well. Upstream is even more sensitive. In pharma R&D, I've heard from doctorate-holding scientists that you're going to be laid off once every 2-3 years on average. Since I'm a private researcher, how good business is for me is directly tied to investment planning activity in downstream chemicals in the same way that oilfield services is directly tied to upstream investment planning activity.
And that's just the US.
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u/sugxrclouds 12d ago
Honestly, to make myself feel better (and I hope you too), I take it that people just like to complain. If the market is never good in the last 5 years then it’s just never good in general. The best you can do is just try your best. ChemE is not a useless degree and I’ve seen all my seniors land jobs at the end so I think we’ll manage.
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u/17399371 12d ago
Graduated in 2011 with 3 competing job offers with no internships. Didn't get more because I stopped looking, not because people stopped recruiting. Was similar for a lot of my peers. Market was pretty hot back then.
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u/Altruistic_Web3924 12d ago
Location matters. In the US the Job market is actually fairly positive for ChemE. A big chunk of the “boomer” generation is retiring and many early career ChemE employees are leaving manufacturing because they were never really interested to begin with.
Entry level is always tough, especially since most companies don’t have the resources to train you. Keep an open mind and go for jobs that will give you the right experiences and it won’t be long for opportunities to come.
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u/Nowhere_Man_Forever 12d ago
Job market was great when I first started in the late 2010s. Trump tariffs V1 slowed things down somewhat, but things recovered pretty quickly, and then the early pandemic mesed it up more, with a bit of a bump immediately after due to the economic rebound. I think the job market was recovering okay until Trump tariffs V2 and now the job market looks incredibly bleak, and it's hard to imagine what the next couple years will look like because tariffs and their completely arbitrary nature are making everything extremely unpredictable.
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u/Delicious-Survey-274 12d ago
Post financial crisis 2018 through 2024 (peaking in 2023/24 thanks to the infrastructure bill)…
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u/MuddyflyWatersman 12d ago edited 11d ago
when I graduated...... I had 6 job offers.....a month before graduation. I had no shortage of interview trip offers either.... I had a professor threaten to flunk me (even though I had an A in his unit op lab) if I missed another one of his classes... because I missed so many for plant interviews. (don't they expect you to get a job???.)... I had an arrangement with my unit op lab partners.. when I was out of town.. they did the experiments and I would write the report. (Typically they did such crappy job with the experiments that I snuck back into the ChE unit op lab late at night through unlocked window (that I left unlocked)... and I re-ran the experiments my self to get better more consistent data that allowed a decent intended result )
When people say they have a hard time finding a job .....ask them what their GPA was. Can't stress enough ... it's important...... would you hire a poor engineer to build something? yeah companies don't want to either. Work experience is good, it's almost necessary.... companies expect for school to teach you the theoretical aspects and summer work will help teach you the practical aspects. However ... you should not expect a little work experience in the summer to totally offset bad grades.
In any job market, the top students have no problem finding a job I assure you
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u/No-Rock2482 12d ago
This is the most LinkedIn-sounding BS I’ve ever heard 😂 no one cares about your GPA after you get your first job
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u/MuddyflyWatersman 12d ago edited 11d ago
ha ha .....keep thinking that. I interview candidates occassionally.... it's on every resume ... and yes we look at it. if you're ashamed to put it on there it's a huge red flag... it might be somewhat less important after 20 years..... but people still put it on there. You think employers are too stupid to realize that if it's not there it's only because it will only hurt you ? If you believe it's not important you've swallowed a line of BS..... until you prove yourself it's important. we've had VPs that only had a 2.2 GPA before.... so it is not everything at some point..(well that was a long time ago today most VPs have phds so theres that ).. when it comes to doing technical work.... it's a lot.... it will open the door or it will close it for you. Put two 10 yr engineer resumes on my desk... one with a 3.8 GPA and one with a 3.2...... I can tell you which one I'm going to read first and closest.
you're also not a real chemical engineer after your first 2-3yr job ... you're a wet behind the ears kid.... who needs to keep their mind open and learn....there's other people out there with more than 10 times your experience and knowledge. We are out all actually still learning our whole careers. Once, a young engineer started say about a plant problem in a meeting..."in my experience ..." my boss at time cut her off and said." what experience????" "Ive got underwear older than you!"🤣
.... you know why most people leave the companies they're at for another job???? it's because they weren't any good at it so those employers let them go or got rid of them outright. The better employees are rewarded and retained. 2/3 people you hire that come from another company ....... are inferior employees and don't last. I say that after working with them for 35 years..... the best employees are the ones we hire out of college and develop ourselves..... and maybe 1/3 or less of the other ones that are hired in with experience are just as good.... very seldom are they better. that applies at all levels from 2nd yr engineer to VP. Hiring outside people is a way to achieve mediocrity if you don't also purge them. We have had to hire people we really didn't want to because we had to have people.... and this was the stack of resumes HR sent to us. We actually began contracting retired ChE employees to do help with talent recruiting for us..... because HR is abysmal... most of HR is the diversity hires.. and that's a fact
when we read resumes.... we are assessing how good of fit for the job the person is... one guy who interviews asks technical questions in the interview that are a bit obscure.... I couldn't even answer them... I've been out of school too long and haven't used some of that stuff... but he expects somebody who hasn't been out of school long to be able to answer them. We also wonder why the candidate is looking for a job..... did they get run off from previous employer..... are they looking for greater responsibility and opportunity ? are they looking for the exact same thing they had before...why? ... do they show a history of bouncing excessively from job to job.... etc. everything is about you is assessed to the best of our abilities, we decide if you're a good fit for OUR.team...because WE are the ones who will work with you. You are not being hired by some nameless HR entity..... We are going to be your boss, coworker, mentor, etc. We also don't want to repeat this processs next year or 2 in the middle of a multi year project.... it may be sad but true.... even during large downsizings companies dont lay off their best employees... a few medium employees may be caught up in the crossfire but the bottom always goes. So.. people are suspicious of everybody they interview...count on it. I'm telling you that from the horse's mouth.
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u/BiGsToNeThRoWeR 12d ago
I was with you until you said good people are always rewarded and “Hiring outside people always leads to mediocrity”. In some idealized world where you took a whole class of MIT graduates that had the same passion for whatever, refining or some specialized interest, then sure, I guess I could see that. But the reality is, people don’t know what they enjoy doing until they start doing it, and then they settle in to what they are good at. Also, the objective of any company is to extract as much out of you while paying as little as possible. That’s why people move, because they want to make more money and their current HR policies are set on regular raises of 3-5% until you reach some band and then you go to another salary band/grade. So I disagree with you on this point.
I don’t put my GPA on my resume except the first one and I’ve never had a problem getting a job. I also don’t think GPA is the only indicator of whether you will succeed or not. Part of working on any team is being able to communicate, if you can’t work with other people or communicate your ideas effectively, it doesn’t matter if you have a 4.0, you will not do well at your job. Unless your job is to sit in a corner and do calculations, and then, if that’s all you want, great, I agree.
To be quite frank, your whole post sounds like a jaded boomer who’s mad that younger people want to leave for more pay/better benefits etc and you only praise people that stay at the same company for 30 years and keep their GPA on their resume, which they haven’t had to use except to apply to positions internally. It in no way reflects the realities of today’s job market and just sounds very out of touch. However, this is your opinion, and I am sharing mine.
Also, why do you use so many “?” And “….” This doesn’t add anything to the sentence structure and just makes it seem as though you’re not very good at writing.
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u/MuddyflyWatersman 12d ago edited 11d ago
Not jaded at all. i make 340k this year. More $ than I ever expected. The low time employees and turnover is how I became more valuable.... it's been a good thing for me and other gray beards because we are the ones that are needed to keep things together.
We laid off probably 70 people over the past couple of years.... all hired in the couple years previous. These people have little severance package... couple of weeks pay. The first people who get cut are usually poor performance and low time employees..... as well as people who aren't working on important projects. The standard severance is a week's pay per year of service.. Sooo.... who's cheaper to lay off? ..... low time employees....by a LOT..... What they think they get by jumping job to job a couple of times.... They lose the first time they get laid off and are unemployed without decent severance. and the second time. and the third.... I feel bad for them when they are 15-20 yr level and just moved here a couple of years ago for a job, and they have a family. Funny....ive been through so many layoffs I've lost count. 8 large id say... but maybe quite a few more... there are small "stealth" layoffs all the time where they let small amounts of people go.... probably every year.. I've never been laid off.... I don't even have to worry about it really... eventually they may lay me off because of age /salary.... but that's okay that happens when it's time to retire and you just get an extra 100-150k to go out the door. Can you imagine going through life always wondering...not if...WHEN.....when you're going to get laid off and be out of a job? that's the norm today. seems that would suck to always have that over your head.... How do you commit to a mortgage when you're not stable in a job? no ...it's not the rosy scenario that you try and paint ....By the time your 30... you need to have a mortgage.... in order to pay a home off before you retire. you can't move around forever.... Any more than a few employers and you're doing yourself a disservice typically..... when people have worked a half dozen places in 15 yrs.... pass.
I have seen the industry change dramatically because of this. most of my job is to holding things together.. preserve ways of doing things.. see that people learn how to do them right...... maintaining our ability to do things somewhat effectively... in spite of high turnover.. . and I will retire soon. so will the few others like me.
But our abilities of the organization are a shadow of what they once were. we once developed a new product and built a plant to produce it in a couple of years. Now we cant do that in a decade....I know why... I lived through the transformation.... young people have no idea what used to be..... and how bad things really are today by comparison.
You cannot even get a decent quotation from an equipment vendor today. Nobody anywhere will spend any real time on anything until they know they have the PO. They send out proposals full of errors that were copy /paste from other proposals, without any of the information you requested. Even approval drawings have errors on them.... Things not deleted or changed. Sometimes they have another customer's name even. Everybody does a poor job.... basically on everything.....everywhere. Not just ChE..... everywhere.
Year by year.... project by project..... I've seen the results get worse and worse. high costs, over budget, extended project times, long commissioning times, tremendous amounts of problems..... The results speak for themselves. A world class organization turned into......meh.... by high turnover of people. the pendulum will swing the other way... because it has to... state of things today is truly unsustainable. I won't be working to see it.
We once built plants with an installed factor of about 4-5 relative to purchase equipment cost. Today that factor is over 10... while taking three times as long as it once did. The difference is inefficiencies in doing all of it... Commissionings in some regions can actually take 1+ years now.... instead of a few months....Nobody ... is any good at what they're supposed to do anymore..... and outsourcing with contractors.... which some believe saves money...... is expensive, time consuming, and produces poor results.
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u/BiGsToNeThRoWeR 11d ago
I don’t disagree with any of that, certainly not the time it takes to do things, I would even say that engineers used to be better in a lot of ways. Once companies shifted the responsibility of doing their own designs to outsourcing it, you probably have a lot of engineers that can’t do things but it’s because they weren’t given the chance to learn. A lot of engineers today are used not as technical people but as the future overseers of operators or something of the sort. So, yeah, I agree with that.
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u/DeadlyGamer2202 12d ago
Six job offers before graduating is impressive honestly. But that’s not what I am asking. The top 1 percentile of students would have no issues with getting a well paying job in most majors. But when I am asking about the job market in general, I mean how it is like for an average decent student (someone with 3.2+ gpa and at least 1 internship). Of course a person with a 2.5 gpa would struggle irrespective of the major.
For comparison I have a 3.2 gpa rn (plan to push it to 3.4+ in my final year), 1 industrial internship and 1 research internship.
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u/MuddyflyWatersman 12d ago edited 12d ago
let me ask you this way..... if there are more chemical engineers than there are jobs.... because a lot of people got into ChE at a point in the cycle..... does that mean it's a bad job market? what if the amount of chemical engineers needed per year is just a fixed constant.....
The way it works is in cycles.... when the number of graduating students is low and they're paying good start salaries.... people hear this and say oh I'll go in to ChE..... then 4 years later there's a surplus of students...... People hear that jobs are hard to come by and they say oh I won't go in to ChE cuz it's hard to get a job.... and 4 years later there's less students again. What you call a job market is people doing the exact opposite of what they probably ought to do. .....
but like I said top students usually have little problem getting jobs.... that applies to all fields. the semester I graduated I graduated with 6 others. we graduated 18 people the whole year in ChE.... 6 one semester and 12 the other... some of those had trouble getting jobs then due to low grades..... but everybody had something before they graduated except the couple people who were going to grad school, and one to law school. That particular year Penn State graduated the largest ChE class that had graduated up to that time one semester of like 50 people. A few years later my school was graduating 50 people.... The industry needs did not quadruple in a few years.... and then came a cyclical economic downturn.... which tends to happen now and then
anyway yep...." bad job market " only depends on GPA. that is something that is in everybody's control. consider how strong of a student you are before picking certain fields...... if you don't have a 3.5 GPA today you have no chance of getting into a med school. once upon a time 2.5 students got into med school. Pre med curricula like biology is almost useless if you don't get into med school it's a wasted undergraduate education.... the point is people have to know these things going in. and if you're not willing to put in the work required then you don't do it. my school graduated an average of 72 people per year with BSChE the last 5 years ..... nothing like the small class we had when I was in school... whe're not only did you know everybody in your class well... ...you knew the people above you a year or 2 , and if you didn't know the graduate students you at least knew who they were... you also interacted very personally with the faculty and knew them well because the classes were small. They actually moved a che elective class once to a time I could take it....
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u/jpc4zd PhD/National Lab/10+ years 12d ago
People typically complain about bad things. Heck, look at the reviews of your favorite place and you will find a lot of “bad reviews.”
When was it good? Early/mid 2000s. ChemE was the “hot, cool, rich major” with O&G paying a lot for new grads. Then the Great Recession hit, and it went to shoot (also a great time to graduate and try to find a job /s).
I have no idea what the past 6 years for new grads have been like, but for people with experience, everyone I know who has been looking for a job, has managed to find one (networking helps here).
For new grads, your first job will likely be your worst job. Get experience, network, and move on to a new position in a few years.