The most important things job seekers look for are a great work environment, satisfaction in their job, benefits and flexibility. But let’s not kid ourselves. Salary is also important, and negotiations can be one of the quickest parts of the job hunt process, usually taking less than a minute. Whether you are accepting a new position or renegotiating your current worth, here are some great suggestions for your approach.

• Most offers you will receive are negotiable. If not, there is no harm in asking. There are two main types of companies in the world that do and do not accommodate this. The first feel that their first offer is their best offer. Companies in this category do a lot of industry research, and do their best to offer a fair, competitive salary. They find little advantage to low-balling and bringing in underpaid personnel. The second type of company is very accustomed to negotiations, and considers it to be an acceptable reality of the hiring process.
• The salary range is divided into three roughly equal segments. The lowest third of the range is reserved for inexperienced workers who show potential; the middle third of the range is for competent workers; and the highest third is for people who bring something extra to the job.
• Do not include your salary requirements. Very few companies will hold it against you, and this information is only to their advantage. If your number is too small, there is no room to negotiate, and if it’s too high, you won’t get a call back.
• Preparation is key. Put together a rough personal budget, keeping in mind that income tax, loan payments and health care will probably account for a huge chunk of each paycheck. Then determine three figures: how much money you think you need; how much you want, and what you think you can live with.
• Always wait until a job has been offered before you begin negotiating.
• The person on the other side of the table is an experienced negotiator. Whoever mentions the first price usually loses the battle. And NEVER mention the smallest amount you are willing to take. After they are forced to name a figure, NEVER jump right on top of it. Research shows that if you acknowledge the offer, contemplate it for a few seconds, and then explain how that figure is smaller then you had expected, the hiring manager will almost always immediately offer more.
• Defend your worth. Showcase examples of your work-related skills and positive benefits to the employer.

Salary negotiation resources:

Wage Web: http://www.wageweb.com
The Salary Calculator: http://www2.homefair.com/calc/salcalc.html
Careers at WSJ: http://public.wsj.com/careers/resources/
documents/cwc-salariesindex.htm
Bureau of Labor Statistics http://www.bls.gov/
Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook Handbook http://stats.bls.gov/oco/oco1000.htm

Or, let us negotiate for you! http://www.thetalleygroup.com/

How would you feel about having your product launched into space?

That is exactly what Dr. Martin Castillo from Queensland University of Technology’s science and engineering faculty has to look forward to. Dr. Castillo is a researcher for the university’s micro-gravity drop tower and has partnered with the United States Air Force to fund research in the development of ZBLAN glass.

This special glass will also be the first QUT project to be launched into space.

ZBLAN glass is the most stable fluoride glass known and is most commonly used to make into optical fiber. The advantage of ZBLAN over other glass, such as silica, is superior infrared transmittance.

According to Castillo, the glass contains a variety of heavy metals that upon cooling “create internal stresses which lead to crystallization of the material, an undesired property for glass.”

‘True ZBLAN glass fibers can only be made in the absence of gravity,” Castillo said.

Working with the material in space allows for the absence of gravity and the ability to overcome the crystallization issues.

The Importance of ZBLAN Glass

We live in a telecommunications whirlwind. However fast our connections are now, we are always looking for faster, better, stronger products and networks.

The glass could revolutionize the way we make fibers for telecommunications and medical imaging tools. Dr. Castillo has found that there is little to no signal loss occurring within the material.

“Signals would be able to be transmitted over much greater distances than in current silicate glass fibers,” he said. “The result of this is potentially eliminating power consuming amplifiers and repeaters while significantly increasing bandwidth.

The glass has been made in several places, but no one has yet figured out how to form it into a fiber.

Dr. Castillo will first conduct research at QUT’s micro-gravity drop tower in an experiment that will see the glass undergo ~2.1 seconds of microgravity over a 21.3 meter drop inside a drag shield.

Dr Castillo, who has previously worked for space programs in the United States and Japan, will then board NASA’s parabolic flight plane, dubbed the ‘vomit comet’, before launching the project into space via a USAF suborbital satellite by mid next year.

“In order to stay at the leading edge of the synthesis of specialized glass, all traditional methods have to be abandoned,” Dr Castillo said.

Are you ready to find your dream engineering job? Contact The Talley Group today!

Meet Shwetak Patel, an assistant professor in the departments of Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington. He’s also a MacArthur Genius.

In September 2011, Patel was named one of 22 MacArthur Fellows, commonly known as the MacArthur Genius Award. The prize comes with $500,000 — no strings attached.

What did he do to achieve this honor? You may as well ask, what didn’t he do?

Among Patel’s inventions: A device that can detect noise on electrical systems to monitor the energy usage of specific appliances and electronics in homes. Zensi, the company founded on that technology, was acquired last year by computer peripheral company Belkin from Patel and his colleagues from Duke and Georgia Tech.

More recently, Patel has been working on a way of using electrical wiring as an antenna to receive signals from a variety of low-powered sensors around the home, to monitor conditions such as air quality

Spin-off research includes the “Humantenna” project, led by UW student Gabe Cohn, which uses a receiver on the human body to determine a person’s position in relation to electrical noise emanating from a home’s wiring system — like Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor, without the need for the Kinect hardware.

Patel’s research is broadly in the areas of ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, and user interface software and technology. He has published over 50 articles since 2003 and has received numerous best paper awards.[2] Patel focuses on developing easy-to-deploy sensing technologies, activity recognition, and applications for energy monitoring. He also has developed novel interaction techniques for mobile devices, mobile sensing systems, and wireless sensor platforms, many of which in collaboration with Microsoft Research, where is also a visiting researcher.

Patel founded Zensi while he was a graduate student at Georgia Tech. After Zensi was acquired by Belkin, Patel made the cover of Seattle Business magazine and was named newsmaker of the year and one of the top 10 start up stories of 2010 by TechFlash.

What will he think of next?

At Talley, we know engineering. Contact us today for more information on how to find your company’s next shining star.

At The Talley Group, we know a good engineering resume when we see one. Do you? Is your resume a powerful marketing tool or a big wordy mess?

While there are engineering jobs across a wide range of disciplines, effective resume strategies are applicable for all of them. Here are 6 pieces of advice to keep in mind when putting together your engineering resume.

Be Precise

Precision is vital when it comes to engineering projects, and the same holds true for engineering resumes. You need to proofread and correct all errors on the resume. If you don’t feel comfortable doing it, ask someone whose attention to detail you trust.

Be Concise

Engineers tend to go into information overload on their resumes. Don’t make that mistake. Resumes get accepted or rejected in a matter of seconds, so you must be efficient in presenting your information. Create a resume that goes straight to the point.

Remove the Objective and Add a Summary

If you’re changing careers, an objective may be warranted. Otherwise, leave it out.  You don’t want it to hurt your candidacy if your objective doesn’t match the specifics of the position opening.

Replace the objective with a qualifications summary. Create a few hard-hitting sentences that spotlight your most marketable qualifications.

Tailor Your Resume to the Job Opportunity

Personalize your resume every time you send it out, according to the open position. You need to make it clear that you are responding to a specific job, not just sending out your resume to any and every job. Customize for the specific role and engineering specialty you are targeting.

List Key Accomplishments

Use bullet points to make your resume easier to read. It will also help you focus on the most key points. You should also quantify the results so employers understand the significance of your work.

Add a Project List

Depending on your engineering specialty and years of experience, you may include a dozen or more key projects on your resume. When this causes your document to overflow onto a third page, a separate project list sheet is an effective solution. List projects by employer or client, and give a short — even one-sentence — description of what you did. And don’t forget to include your project outcomes.

An honest and well-crafted resume will facilitate your job search. If you’d like more advice on how to find the right job for you, contact The Talley Group today!

 It turns out the problem of America turning out fewer engineers might be easily solved. A recent survey of teens commissioned by Intel Corporation found that a major barrier to American teenagers pursing engineering careers is just a lack of familiarity with the profession. Once exposed to the facts about engineering, such as descriptions of what various engineers actually do and how much money they earn, more than half the teens surveyed said they’d consider engineering as a career.

What kind of facts influenced the teens? Realizing engineers’ roles in:

• rescuing the Chilean miners who were trapped in 2010
• delivering clean water to poor communities in Africa
• designing the protective pads worn by athletes
• constructing dams and levees that keep entire cities safe.

The study turned up some interesting numbers:

• Fifty-three percent were more likely to consider engineering after learning about the role of engineers in the development of music and video games
• An even fifty percent were influenced by the understanding that engineers make driving, texting, and social networking possible;
• Sixty-one percent were influenced after learning engineers make an average annual income of $75,000;
• More than 50 percent were more likely to consider the field upon learning that the unemployment rate amongst engineers is more than 4 percentage points lower than the national rate.

Currently, American university students tend to drop out of engineering programs. But experts are finding that the majority of students who concentrate on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in college actually make that choice during high school.

Colleges and professional societies across the country are encouraged to continue offering creative initiatives to stimulate student interest early. Inspiring youths to solve the problems they see around them, as they learn how things work and discover how to improve products and processes, is an important step toward careers in engineering.

Most engineers can recall when their interest in engineering was sparked. Some recall taking toys apart and rebuilding them. Others had a parent in the industry or an outstanding teacher or extracurricular activity that ignited their passion. Giving current and future generations the chance to explore the career possibilities in engineering will certainly create more such sparks.

Any questions about the engineering field and your place in it? Need to hire an engineering professional? The Talley Group is here to help, so contact us today.

You’ve never met Don Bateman. But he might have saved your life.

More than 40 years ago, Bateman invented the “ground proximity warning” system that prevents pilots in poor visibility from flying a functioning airplane into a mountain or other obstacle.

Bateman’s technology eliminated “the number one killer in aviation for decades,” according to Bill Voss, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation.  “It’s accepted within the industry that Don Bateman has probably saved more lives than any single person in the history of aviation.”

How He’s Done It

Motivated by an airplane disaster he witnessed as a boy, Bateman has tracked air disasters for 40 years to devise ways of preventing them.

He developed his first system by taking data from the technology that was already on airplanes—the radar altimeter, the airspeed indicator—and synthesize the information to create a warning system. Twenty years later, he integrated GPS technology with ever-improving terrain data to upgrade his system and what it can do.

After 50+ years at Honeywell, Bateman is still working, still fine-tuning his technology. His constantly updated digital charting of terrain around the globe, which includes data derived from detailed maps compiled for the Soviet-era military, has created a priceless database used to keep fliers safe.

Bateman’s Technology Becomes the Law

Bateman devised his original ground-proximity-warning system (GPWS) in the early 1970s, using an airplane’s radar altimeter to detect rapid altitude changes as a plane approached terrain. A warning sounded if a plane was too low without the landing gear deployed or if the descent was too fast.

After a TWA 727 crashed into a Virginia mountainside in December 1974, the FAA ordered that Bateman’s technology be installed on all large airliners. That rule was later extended to all airplanes carrying more than six passengers.

Since 1994, when Bateman integrated GPS technology into his system, most airlines have installed  the enhanced system on their entire fleets.  Today, it is installed on about 55,000 airplanes worldwide. And Bateman studies each new aviation accident for even further enhancements.

Well-Deserved Honors

It’s impossible to quantify precisely how many lives Bateman’s technology has saved.

Since the FAA certified the enhanced system in 1994, Honeywell has identified about 80 incidents where pilots reported that the warnings averted disaster. Overall, Bateman’s technology has reduced the likelihood of a once-common type of airplane crash by 99.9 percent.

In September 2011, President Obama awarded Bateman the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. He had already earned induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005.  All of this for an electrical engineer who started off working at a telephone equipment company.

Q. What do bulletproof vests, fire escapes and windshield wipers have in common?

 A. All were invented by, or refined by, women.

Bulletproof Vest

Credit for the first commercially available bulletproof vest goes to a man, but it was a woman who invented Kevlar, the material used in most modern bulletproof vests.

Stephanie Kwolek, working at DuPont, created the first of a family of synthetic fibers of exceptional strength and stiffness, including Kevlar.

Kwolek graduated from the women’s college of Carnegie-Mellon University and applied for a position as a chemist with the DuPont Company in 1946. She worked on several projects, including a search for new polymers as well as a new condensation process that takes place at lower temperatures. In 1965, she was asked to scout for the next generation of high-performance fibers and invented Kevlar.

Kwolek has received many awards for her invention, including induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1994 as only the fourth woman member of 113. In 1996 she received the National Medal of Technology, and in 1997 the Perkin Medal, presented by the American Section of the Society of Chemical Industry—both honors rarely awarded to women.

Fire Escape

Supposedly, the first fire escape was patented in 1766. That system was rudimentary and involved a pulley attached to a wicker basket. In 1887, an American inventor named Anna Connelly registered a patent for the exterior steel staircase that would serve as the prototype for the modern metal fire escape. Connelly’s invention introduced a cost-effective way to add safety to both existing buildings and new construction in the 1900s. It became mandatory under the building codes that cities began to adopt at the turn of the century.

Windshield Wipers

In 1902, on a New York City streetcar on a snowy day, Mary Anderson watched the driver struggle to see through the front window and wondered why no one had ever done something to improve visibility in inclement weather. Upon being told it had been tried and couldn’t be done, Anderson began drawing diagrams for what would later become windshield wipers.

Her windshield wipers were made of wood and rubber and were removable so that the streetcar appearance would not be compromised in good weather. She added a counterweight to maintain an even pressure on the windshield, and effectively wipe off snow and rain. She was awarded a patent in 1903 for a “window-cleaning device,” or windshield wipers.

On her patent application, she stated, “My invention relates to an improvement in window-cleaning devices in which a radially-swinging arm is actuated by a handle from inside of a car-vestibule.”

As soon as Anderson’s windshield wipers were patented, she wrote to a large company in Canada offering them the rights. The company was not interested, stating that her invention had little, if any, commercial value and would not sell. Anderson’s patent was put away and eventually expired. Although Anderson never profited from her invention, it was re-examined soon after, and by 1913 mechanical windshield wipers were standard on domestic cars, including the Ford Model T.

In 1917, windshield wipers evolved when the “Electric Storm Windshield Cleaner,” was patented by Charlotte Bridgewood – another woman.

The National Academy of Engineering, in 2003, published A Century of Innovation: Twenty Engineering Achievements that Transformed our Lives, which showcased the greatest engineering achievements of the 20^th century.

Here are the top 20:

1.         Electrification
2.         Automobile
3.         Airplane
4.         Water Supply and Distribution
5.         Electronics
6.         Radio and Television
7.         Agricultural Mechanization
8.         Computers
9.         Telephone
10.       Air Conditioning and Refrigeration
11.       Highways
12.       Spacecraft
13.       Internet
14.       Imaging
15.       Household Appliances
16.       Health Technologies
17.       Petroleum and Petrochemical Technologies
18.       Laser and Fiber Optics
19.       Nuclear Technologies
20.       High-performance Materials

You’ll see that the benefits were largely universal, affecting people across the globe and at all economic levels. The technologies were diverse and depended on timely parallel accomplishments in science, mathematics and medicine.  And, the devices that enabled all these innovations were made in such quantity and quality that they were affordable and relatively universally available.

We can’t really know what engineers will achieve between now and 2101, but one engineer is willing to guess.

Inspired by the NAE’s book, engineer and Senior Intel Fellow Eugene S. Meieran, decided to make a list of predictions. Over the course of several years, he mentioned the list in presentations at universities, conferences, and industrial seminars, and took suggestions from other professionals.

Without further ado, here are the areas where Meieran believes the greatest achievements will happen in the next 88 years:

1. Energy conservation
2. Resource protection
3. Food and water production and distribution
4. Waste management
5. Education and learning
6. Medicine and prolonging life
7. Security and counter-terrorism
8. New technology
9. Genetics and cloning
10. Global communication
11. Traffic and population logistics
12. Knowledge sharing
13. Integrated electronic environment
14. Globalization
15. AI, interfaces and robotics
16. Weather prediction and control
17. Sustainable development
18. Entertainment
19. Space exploration
20. “Virtualization” and VR
21. Preservation of history
22. Preservation of species

What do you think? Is Meieran right on the money, or not even close?

Budget woes in several states led to at least four schools closing down physics or physics-related majors back in 2010. Because of shortfalls in revenue, state boards of education were forced to scrutinize the academic programs offered at schools and universities under their purview.

Back then, Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana was forced to drop eight degree programs including its physics major and its physics education major. Missouri had to cut out the physics major at Northwest Missouri State University. Missouri State University in Springfield was able to keep its physics major but had to eliminate its engineering physics bachelor’s degree. North Arizona State University in Flagstaff, AZ similarly had to eliminate its engineering physics bachelor’s degree along with its “physics and math” major.

Now it’s Texas’ turn.

Seven public universities in Texas, our second largest state, are being told they have to phase out their physics undergraduate degrees, with three more being put on two-year probation. In an attempt to make the system more efficient, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) reviewed all of its public university’s undergraduate programs that produced a small number of graduates, and recommended a number for termination.

Physics programs at Midwestern State, Prairie View A&M, Tarleton State, Texas Southern, University of Texas-Brownsville and West Texas A&M are all losing their undergraduate physics programs. Current students can finish out their degree, but no new physics students can be accepted. Texas A&M Commerce, the University of Texas-Pan American and Texas Tech are all on two-year probation.

Why? Low enrollment and an even lower number of graduates. And according to the American Physical Society, a professional society of physicists, if the same 25-students-in-5-years standard were applied nationally, 526 of about 760 programs would be shuttered. In other words, close to 70% of the nation’s physics degree programs would be cut.

Those who teach at the college level say addressing the enrollment problem requires more qualified physics teachers in secondary education to increase enthusiasm for the subject among younger students. But it seems like this measure is just going to perpetuate the downward spiral.

Texas passed a law requiring that all high school students to take physics classes, starting in 2005. But now there will be fewer universities to produce high school physics teachers–and there’s already a shortage of physics teachers.

Florida may be the next state to follow Texas’ example. Texas’ plans are being watched by officials in other states who need to reduce higher-education budgets, and Florida governor Rick Scott has publicly voiced an interest in similar measures. Could your state be next?

By: JP Bruner

2012 is here and we are off to the races. Business is brisk with more openings in December than ever surging momentum into January. Aerospace, Energy, and Manufacturing are all up. See our most recent open jobs here: http://www.jobs.thetalleygroup.com

Wishing every one a prosperous and happy new year!