So Many Wireless Jobs, so Few Engineers
When little Pacific Communication Sciences Inc. of San Diego heard that IBM Corp. was laying off dozens of electronics engineers in Florida in 1994, the upstart company wasted no time in dispatching a recruitment team that succeeded in hiring 15 of them.
The carrot: The fast-growing wireless communications company agreed to open an office in Boca Raton and let the software designers “telecommute” from there, minimizing the dislocation of the new employees and their families.
Last year, Pacific Communication repeated the maneuver in Britain, parachuting in another team of headhunters that hired 15 integrated circuit design engineers who had been laid off by a British telecommunications company. Again, it agreed to let the new employees stay put, leasing a suburban London office to accommodate them.
The company’s hiring efforts illustrate the extraordinary lengths to which companies must go to recruit technical staff at a time when the rapid growth of the telecommunications industry has meant an acute shortage of electronics engineers.
Technical employees in the booming mobile telecom industry in particular are an increasingly precious commodity. The boom in cellular telephone sales, manufacturing and support has jacked up demand for engineers and technicians beyond the capacity of universities cranking out the graduates.
The demand is expected to accelerate in coming years as more digital wireless services--from voice messaging to electronic mail--become accessible over mobile handsets.
In San Diego alone, fast-growing telecom companies such as Pacific Communication, Qualcomm Inc., National Dispatch Center and others added 10,000 jobs in the last five years. The city is rapidly becoming a telecommunications hub on a par with the Dallas, Raleigh, N.C., and San Francisco Bay areas.
Those companies and others say they would hire many more tech workers if only they could find qualified personnel. Although payroll is growing by an average 200 employees a month at Qualcomm, Dan Sullivan, senior vice president of human resources, said he has 700 additional technical staff openings he can’t fill.
“Our need for people continues to be intense . . . for everyone from engineers to assembly line workers,” said Sullivan, whose company has grown from eight to 4,500 employees since 1985. The need for new employees is fueled in part by Qualcomm’s recent joint ventures with Sony Corp. and Northern Telecom Inc. to make wireless handsets and equipment in San Diego.
Telecommunications firms that are moving operations to San Diego further ratchet up demand, said Martha Dennis, Pacific Communication’s vice president of engineering. Pacific Bell, Nokia of Finland and Uniden of Japan each have started wireless communications operations in San Diego in recent years, making hundreds of local hires in the process, she said.
Overall, at least 1,000 electronics and computer engineers are needed per year in the San Diego area alone, said local executive headhunter Robert J. Watkins. But each year, UC San Diego and San Diego State University between them turn out only 300 computer and electrical engineers, not all of whom end up working in San Diego.
The engineering talent shortage is nothing new, Watkins said.
“In the go-go days of defense buildup in the 1980s, there weren’t enough avionics or radar engineers in Southern California,” he said. “Companies had to be creative and flexible to find who they needed.”
Engineers making the rounds of potential employers typically have three or four offers on the table, said Beth Walsh, director of marketing services at National Dispatch Center, a San Diego digital communications company that has 1,000 employees and is adding 70 more a month.
Prospective employees with the right credentials enjoy considerable bargaining power, particularly when it comes to salary. The spectrum of that power ranges from an electronics engineer with a freshly minted undergraduate degree who can start at $40,000 to $55,000 a year to a 30-year-old software engineer with a doctorate and five years’ experience who can earn as much as $100,000 a year.
“We have 10 to 12 positions that are open at any given time,” said Marilyn Suey, vice president of marketing at Applied Digital Access of San Diego. “They are difficult to fill because there is so much competition.”
Telecommunications companies in Southern California are at a negotiating disadvantage with some prospective job candidates because, by and large, many candidates would rather work in Silicon Valley, where there are 10 times as many telecommunications companies, affording more career options.
Qualify-of-life issues are also a concern for some job candidates.
“It’s tough to get people from other centers of high technology such as Dallas and Raleigh, where the housing is much cheaper and where people seem to have less questions about educating their kids,” Suey said.
That competition has forced local telecommunications companies to offer coveted engineers a signing bonus of up to 25% of their annual salary, said Bill Atkinson, president of XLNT Design, a data communications company in San Diego.
“There are so many start-up companies and many more opportunities for engineers than there are technical folks,” Atkinson said. “Companies are willing to pay what it takes to get them.”
Chris Kraul can be reached at (619) 544-6040 or via e-mail at chris.kraul@latimes.com
