Would your firm hire someone with an engineering degree outside your field?

[gb25]

I wanted to hear other thoughts on it, would you or your firm hire someone who did graduate with an Engineering degree but in a different field from what you practice? Assume it's from an ABET accredited intitution and the individual has not taken the FE.

 

[SE_FL]

We do civil, environmental and structural. We would look at hiring construction, geotechnical or architectural. Another local firm hired a structural graduate for a civil position and they've been there over a year. Our applicant pool is pretty small, maybe cause it's a small town. And we don't pay that great so it's hard to find the right fit.

 

[gb25]

Those fields make sense to me, at my firm recently we hired someone with a Mechanical Engineering degree. He is related to the branch manager which is how he got the job but it still has me scratching my head how that will work out. We focus in civil/geotechnical work primarily

 

[SE_FL]

We did that for a recent grad over the summer (son of the boss' friend). Then he used us as a reference and found a job in his field. It's probably temporary. It's nice to have engineering contacts in other fields. Build up your LinkedIn network, you never know when your contacts may come in handy.

 

[OHBridgeGuy]

I worked with someone who graduated with Aerospace/Mechanical in a Structural capacity right out of school and it went well.  He left after about a year to go more to his field but I had mostly been teaching him finite element methods so the skills transferred pretty well.  ME's take a lot of the same classes as structural, particularly in grad school, but they may lack some of the knowledge on codes - ACI, AISC, AASHTO, etc.