Where Engineers Are Likely to Find Design Jobs

Statistics Canada publishes a steady stream of papers about all sorts of topics of possible interest to career developers. I subscribe to this stream as an RSS feed which I built using the page2RSS service. (You can subscribe to my feed too if you wish.)

A paper called “Characteristics of Canadian Manufacturing Firms That Undertake Design Activities: An Empirical Analysis of Results of the Survey of Advanced Technology, 2007” by H. G. Sam-Aggrey attracted my attention a day or two ago because it indicates where engineers and others in designer occupations might be mostly likely to find employment.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the paper’s summary:

• “Among industries, firms engaged in computer and electronic product manufacturing and those in machinery manufacturing had the highest propensities to perform design.”
• “Larger firms are more likely than smaller ones to engage in design activities.”
• “The main differences between design performing firms that are innovators compared to the non innovators are that the firms in the latter group are more likely to be small firms, less likely to be exporters, less likely to be using advanced technologies and less likely to have a high percentage of their employees involved in R&D activities.”

From the point of view of the job seeker I would say that most of these characteristics can be ascertained from a study of on-line sources, such as Strategis.