Abstract: Parachuting to a Soft Landing in the Silicon Valley Job Hunt

At the top of the ladder, we learn that corporate leaders often get a "golden parachute" to enable them to move to another position with little financial hardship. The rest of us have to make other plans, or find ourselves making these plans when we find ourselves out of work.

Income and job satisfaction are the major reasons engineers take the jobs they do. The "job hunt" is a process of finding a match between the employer's need and the employee's capabilities or skills. A Great match allows the employer to make more profit, and reward the employee with a larger income. However, even in today's Internet world, the process of finding a good match between employer and employee still seems to be sub-optimal.

Following the cancellation of the U.S. Apollo program, IEEE members experienced an economic dislocation that was quite unexpected at the time, considering the value the country had put on the engineering profession, and the electronics industry up to that point in time. On the frontline of helping these highly trained individuals find new work, Dick Bolles published a guide to the job hunting process in 1970, called "What Color is Your Parachute?", which offered a better approach to the job hunt than "find the ad, mail a resume, wait and hope." The book has since become known as "the Job Hunter's Bible" [see www.jobhuntersbible.com] and is now updated annually.

While the internet speeds up the process by which one can "find a posting, email a resume, wait for an interview", many find it just increases the rate of rejection. Since the principles of a better matching process still hold true, the IEEE Santa Clara Valley PACE has arranged for a discussion of the job search process by the author to assist the members in the section who are facing a job transition now, or may face one in the near future.