Technical Career Advice Section

I have been working a Technical Career Advice section for a couple of months now. The initial impetus for this section was my participation in the Career Advice section of the PhysicsForums. The discussion in that section was strongly oriented towards scientific and academic jobs, and I felt that someone needed to represent the industrial and engineering side of things. In the past nine months, I have learned a great deal about the technical job market that complements my work in recruitment and career mentoring at my company.

Anyone who would like to learn a great deal about the technical job market should check out the Career Advice section. However, one would do well to remember that free advice is worth what you pay for it. One needs to keep one's own judgment about one's own career, and the information given on that forum is not guaranteed to be right. With that caveat, I can recommend it strongly.

I have been collecting information about careers and job performance, and I will be placing this information in my own career advice section. Some things will be general, but most of my advice will focus on careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics [STEM], since that is where my passion and my experience are.

I enabled the first page today, Places to Look for Jobs, because I have enjoyed the two sites I placed there so much. The best two job sites I know are Indeed and Glassdoor. Both have provided me with good information, so I can recommend them. Glassdoor requires you to provide information in order to see more than a preview, but the quality of the information is high. It is worth remarking that the company reviews are provided by people with a reason to review a company, which often means disgruntled employees, but if you keep that in mind and look for the general gist of the reviews, you can get an idea of what a company is like. The salary information is also quite good on Glassdoor, and it gives you the ability to compare salaries across companies and locations. It is all self-reported, but it seems to match up with other salary information I can find, so I think it is basically reliable. Indeed is a job site aggregator, and it gives you access to more jobs than any other site I have found, with a robust, Google-based search functionality.