Cannon Articles

Recent Engineering Liaison Office articles from the Cannon Newspaper

Virtual Career Fair

The Engineering Liaison Office will be hosting a Virtual Career Fair in March of this year, providing engineering students with additional opportunities for employer contact. All of the elements of an Engineering Career Information Day will be put online. Engineers will be able to take advantage of 24 hour access to employer information for a one week period.

This initiative has been made possible through the use of the profit from last year’s highly successful Engineering Career Information Day. The money is being used to employ two engineering students to develop the Virtual Career Fair web site. Access to this site will be restricted to University of Toronto engineering students because this is engineering money.

Initial response by companies to this new venture has been positive. One company, Anderson Consulting, is interested in providing assistance and possibly resources for this project. Progress to date includes discussion with Anderson and the hiring of two students to set up the site.

Stay tuned for further details!

How to Get a Summer Job!

Started searching for a summer job yet? If not, don’t put it off another day. This year’s summer job market is already heating up with salaries in the $8 - $15 an hour range. In order to find a summer job, especially an engineering related one, it is important to remember the following.

Know Yourself

To sell yourself to a potential employer you need to know what skills you have to offer, as well as your strengths and weaknesses. Engineering students often overlook including transferable skills in their resumes even though engineering employers consistently put these skills on their top ten list of skills sought. Visit the Career Resource Library or participate in one of the Career Centre’s Skills and Options workshops if you are unsure of how to complete a thorough skills assessment.

Know the Market

90% of available summer jobs are never advertised. To find unadvertised jobs try networking; talk to friends, professors, neighbours and relatives. Find out if they know people in companies or industries in which you are interested in working. Create a list of network contacts, review our summer job search binders for potential contacts, conduct speculative mailings, go on information interviews, and research potential employers by using the many resources available at the Career Centre.

Know How to Market Yourself

You need an effective resume and covering letter to promote yourself to employers. Your resume and covering letter demonstrates to potential employers that your skills and abilities match their needs. Examples of skills sought by employers today include: communication skills, initiative, leadership potential, teamwork ability, interpersonal skills and self-confidence. Be sure that you include these skills in addition to your technical skills. For a professional looking resume attend a Resume and Covering Letter seminar, offered at the Career Centre. If you already have a resume, make an appointment to have it critiqued at the Resume Clinic.

Know the Value of any Summer Experience

Allow some flexibility in your summer job search, if a full-time position doesn’t materialize, consider part-time or temporary work. If you want to work for a particular company, think about accepting a less prestigious position. Remember, the contacts you make this summer working in the shipping department may lead to an engineering position next summer. Consider volunteering as this is a good way to get career-related training and make contacts, while helping others. Another possibility is starting your own business. There are a variety of sources of information and financing for students wishing to set-up their own summer businesses.

Begin your job search early and seek assistance in developing your resume writing and interview skills. With a lot of work and a little luck, your summer job search will pay-off. Not only will you be earning money but gaining experience that will prove useful when seeking full-time continuing employment. Good-luck with your search!

Summer Employment Survey

As many of you may recall, you were asked to complete a summer employment survey back in the fall. What follows are the highlights of the results of that survey as well as a listing, by discipline, of the companies where students indicated they had worked. It is interesting to note in this list the exceptionally high number of students who had summer positions overseas. I hope that you find this information useful in your own summer job search.

Students were asked to fill out a short questionnaire in class. 945 surveys were completed representing 49% of those who could potentially complete the survey. The objective of the survey was to obtain a brief summary of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd year engineering students summer employment status in 1996. Summer employment surveys have been conducted in the past however the primary reason for those surveys was to gather marketing leads.

Overall numbers show that 80.5% of all respondents had summer jobs in 1996. 73.6% of first year; 84.7% second year; and 84.0% of third year respondents indicated that they had a summer job in 1996. Those students who indicated that they did not have a summer job were asked why. Only 7% of all respondents stated that they did not have a summer job because they were unable to find one.

Students were also asked to indicate whether or not their jobs were "career related". The response to this question clearly shows the correlation between level of education and "career relatedness" with 28.4% of first year, 62.2% of second year and 64.5% of third year stating they had a career related position.

Respondents were asked whether their jobs qualified for the 600 hour practical experience requirement. 26.7% first year; 65.7% of second year and 70.6% of third year repsondents indicated that their position did qualify for the 600 hour requirement. Only 9.5% of students in their third year indicated that their summer job did not qualify.

The Survey asked students how they got their summer job. Possible responses were Friend, Family Member, Business or Skule Contact, Newspaper, Career Centre, or Other. As 80% of the jobs available at a given time are never advertised, one would expect the highest responses to this question in the Friend, Family Member, Business or Skule Contact categories. As it turned out the highest response across all years was in the ‘Other’ category. This fact may be partly explained by the fact that returning PEY student checked off the ‘Other’ option to explain how they obtained their summer employment. The survey did not have a separate category for PEY students. It is possible that ‘Other’ was selected by those who worked for a previous employer. The second highest response for first and second year respondents was ‘Family Member’ 19.4% and 16.1% repectively. 14.3% of third year respondents indicated ‘Business or Skule contact.

What this survey tells us overall is that engineering students seem to be very successful at finding career related summer employment. That success is affected by a number of variables but most importantly by the year that students have just completed. As students progress through their undergraduate program, each year provides an opportunity to acquire and practice the skills so necessary for finding employment. These skills are: the ability to build a network of contacts; ensuring the skills, developed in previous positions, are clearly presented on a focused résumé; researching a company or industry, either through library research or summer employment; and using the research to become more proficient in employment interviews. It continues to be a fact of life that the more experience a student has the better their chances of finding career related summer employment. This fact will continue to give second and third year students an edge in finding engineering summer jobs, particularly if they begin their search early.

Electronic Résumés

To succeed in your job search in the information age, you will need to add an electronic résumé to your traditional job search tools. In preparing your electronic résumé you need to consider a number of issues
including: finding out whether the employers to whom you are applying accept them; what format it should take, and what security concerns you should have. You should also consider that many résumés are now sorted and ranked by the number of keywords (nouns that describe skills, education, experience, or characteristics) found in them.

Today, many large companies are making use of electronic résumés and scanning technologies while smaller companies are buying services from commercial automated tracking system bureaus. Unfortunately, there are
no accurate statistics on the use of electronic résumés in hiring. You might want, however, to prepare your résumé in electronic format as the use of this technology is becoming more prevalent.

Post-secondary students have been among the first groups of people to make use of electronic résumés as part of their job search. While some students have developed a healthy fear that someone will get their home address and phone number from an electronic résumé, others are not aware of possible consequences of ignoring the security issue. Control and confidentiality should be a concern. Remember, once you have posted your résumé, consider it a public document and out of your control. Instead of putting your home address on the résumé, just list your email address. You might also want to consider renting a post office box and a voice mail account during your job search.

Preparing your résumé for the internet is not difficult. Most word processors and résumé-writing programs will let you save a file to plain text, also called ASCII or DOS text. Begin by creating a traditional résumé with all of the formatting and display style recommended. Next, print a copy of the résumé and then make a copy of the computer file. Name it résumé.txt, and tell the program to save this to text only.

Using any text editor, edit the résumé.txt file to resemble your printed résumé. Redo the spacing and add some unique characters to highlight your skills. Remember that you may need to alter the margins a bit for the email. No more than 65 - 70 characters across the screen as longer lines will not be displayed. Use sans serif typefaces (Helvetica for example) and a 10-14 point range. There is some controversy about whether or not bolding is ok. Italics, script, underlining, graphics or shading are definite no-nos. You might consider the following characters for substitutes: bullets--use asterisks (*) or plus signs (+) at the beginning of lines; lines--use a series of dashes to separate sections; bold text--consider capital letters or asterisks to surround the text. Don't try to highlight text within your résumé, but highlight the headers or titles of each section. Minimal use of horizontal/vertical lines and no compression of space between letters (don't minimize space between letters or words to squeeze a line in) is also good practice.

Make sure your name is the first piece of text on the résumé. Always include memberships as they are sometimes part of the keyword search criteria. White space is good. Avoid repeating a word, use a synonym to maximize your chance of a match. Minimize general abbreviations (MVP) and maximize industry jargon and abbreviations (JIT for example). Call it what it is; instead of iron spike, call it a nail.

Once you have redone your résumé in electronic format, mail it to yourself or to a friend to see how it looks after being mailed. This will help you identify any formatting problems before you start sending it out to possible employers.

Résumés, increasingly, are sorted and ranked by the number of keywords found in them. A good electronic résumé will contain the necessary keywords to attract attention whether it is being read by a hiring manager, scanned and searched in a management system, or indexed on an Internet site. Cost-saving is the main reason for the increased use of scanning technology. With fewer HR staff and more applicants, scanning is a cost effective method of screening résumés. You should learn to describe yourself in keywords. Ensuring that you are telling the truth, try to include keywords from employment advertisements that interest you.

Scanning software will perform a first scan for keywords (both required and desirable). The computer then produces a list of preferred candidates in order of rank based on the number of matches. The system reads numbers (not words) to assess the amount of experience you have so use 91-96 rather than five years. It is important to put all the key information up front as some systems will read a limited number of keywords and will then stop. A summary of key skills at the beginning of your résumé is worth considering although there is some debate about this. When employers get the results of a scan for suitable résumés they are given one of 3 basic forms: full text, applicant summary or exact copy. Remember, the key to writing winning electronic résumés is to focus on keywords and nouns.

Once you've put together an electronic résumé you can forward it to networking contacts or recruiters through email. Always send text in the message and then ask if they would like a printed copy for their records. Never assume you can attach a word-processed document to an email message to someone. Dot forget to include a cover letter and a note explaining why you are contacting this person. If you're responding to an advertised position, use the job title and/or reference number as the subject of your message.

In addition to forwarding your electronic résumé to individuals, you can also post it in one of any number of employment databases. If you have found several good job listings at a particular site, consider registering your résumé there. Once you have done this, you can usually send just a quick message or reference number to apply for an advertised position within the database of listings.

Adding an electronic résumé to your traditional job search tools will only increase your chances of success in today's employment market. Once you have found out whether the employers to whom you are applying accept electronic résumés, learned how to format your electronic résumé and ensured that you are aware of potential security concerns, you can bring your résumé into the information age.

Good Luck!

[Go Back]

University of Toronto, Engineering Computing Facility