Job Search Is Hard Work for O.C. Graduates

With corporate recruiting down 30% on college campuses in the most enduring recession to hit Orange County since World War II, this year’s graduates at Cal State Fullerton, UC Irvine, Chapman University and other area schools are frantically seeking jobs--many without success.

Brian Collins, a business major at Cal State Fullerton, finished his classes in January and began an intensive job search in his marketing specialty in March.

By last week, as Collins thumbed through a loose-leaf binder of job listings on one of his thrice weekly trips to the university’s career center, it was painfully evident that he’d still be a part-time waiter when he receives his bachelor’s degree diploma in graduation ceremonies today.

“You grow up thinking that everyone who gets a degree lands a nice job,” the 25-year-old Anaheim Hills man said. “It’s kind of disheartening to find out that isn’t so.”

Career counselors at Fullerton and UCI tell students there are jobs out there, but they are harder to find and harder to land. What it will take, they say, is persistence, preparation and often a willingness to relocate. Be forewarned: Entry level wages may be lower than even a few years ago in some fields.

“Among our students, there’s a lot of unrest,” said Bobbe Browning, director of Cal State Fullerton’s career development center. “Just like at our university, everything is up in the air. We won’t know our budget probably until mid-August.”

It may take many of this spring’s graduates at least that long to find employment in some fields.

“Because of the tremendous downsizing of the defense and aerospace industry in Orange and Los Angeles counties, our engineering graduates are having to do a wider job search,” Browning said. “By now, most of last year’s graduates have found positions. However, they are having to do things that they might not have done before: take out-of-state jobs and jobs with non-traditional companies.”

There are bright spots in an otherwise bleak landscape.

Biotechnology hiring is up 20% over last year, university counselors say.

“There’s a whole other population of jobs out there: medical manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, the health care industry,” said Randall Williams, placement director for UCI’s Graduate School of Management.

The county has lost nearly 30,000 non-agricultural jobs in the last year, and the local unemployment rate has hovered at 5.5% during much of the early part of the year, according to state labor officials. That is still considerably better than the state unemployment rate of 8.5%, or jobless rates of 9% in Los Angeles County and 9.8% for Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

“It’s kind of a mixed bag out there. It’s not like everybody is laying off and nobody is hiring,” Williams said. “Our good people are picking up jobs, and at the same salary levels we saw last year. That’s certainly not true for everybody. . . . But I would say that the ones who are motivated, and not paralyzed by what they’re reading in the newspaper about the economy and job market, are finding fairly significant positions.”

Civil engineering graduates are finding work thanks to the myriad freeway and tollway projects underway in Orange County, Browning said. Some are even able to make the switch to environmental engineering positions. But civil engineers represent less than a fourth of Fullerton’s engineering graduates.

Consider Kiet Nguyen. The 28-year-old Garden Grove man got his master’s degree in electrical engineering in August, 1991. He landed a job at a Tustin manufacturer of fire detection systems fairly quickly. Trouble was, he got laid off in November.

“It’s kind of hard to get a job in general, because you’re going against experienced people who are out of work,” Nguyen said. “Employers are requiring eight to 10 years of experience. I don’t have that.”

He did have the promise of a job at a major Pasadena engineering firm to work on a project. But when the firm’s client put that project on hold, mainly because of the recession, Nguyen’s job went on ice with it.

“Right now, I’m willing to take any kind of job that’s available, commercial or industrial,” said Nguyen, who has been supporting himself with small engineering projects that may pay a few hundred dollars for a week or so of work.

The number of such free-lance jobs appears to be on the rise among companies that are hesitant to hire permanent employees, yet still have projects to get done.

“Over the last three or four months, we’ve been getting a lot of calls from companies for our students,” UCI’s Williams said. “There’s an awful lot of pent-up demand for work out there. . . . One might need a marketing research person to do a product analysis. Another might be converting from on-line mainframe computer system to a PC-based accounting system.”

Many among the nearly 12,000 Orange County students graduating from four-year colleges and universities in the area already have work in their chosen field, but are looking to improve their lot with a diploma.

John Derevjanik has wanted to be an electrical engineer for as long as he can remember. Now that he’s a semester away from his bachelor’s degree at Cal State Fullerton, he has worked his way up to his company’s engineering department and is hoping for further advancement when he gets his diploma next year.

Many of his graduating friends and fellow electrical engineering students don’t have that kind of safety net, admitted the 26-year-old senior from Laguna Beach. “A lot of them are just going on to graduate school because the market isn’t ready for this many engineers.”

Indeed, graduate school applications are up 25% over last year at Cal State Fullerton, as well as at other universities. At least some of that interest is linked to the recession.

“Given a soft job market, some folks are going to graduate school to develop their career opportunities,” said James Blackburn, Cal State Fullerton’s director of admissions. “It’s axiomatic. Anytime the economy goes down, college applications go up. Of course if things get too bad, applications go down and everything kind of stops.”

Yet even graduate school isn’t a passport to a cushy future.

Take the students getting their MBA--masters of business administration--next month at UCI’s Graduate School of Management.

“Most people think you get an MBA and you automatically get a $50,000-a-year job,” said Marsheila Devan, 33, of Capistrano Beach, who will get her MBA at UCI on June 13. “That isn’t true anymore. . . . There are some people in the school who aren’t concerned because their parents are taking care of them. But there is a core of people who are pretty desperate to find a job.”

One management professor told Devan this is the worst job market she has seen in years. And Linda White, director of UCI’s women’s opportunities center, said most career centers at universities across the nation are finding recruitment down at least 30%. Partly in response, 38 U.S. MBA programs have banded together for the first time to make recruiting easier by holding consolidated job fairs at one campus.

But some companies that are recruiting on college campuses are not offering jobs, just raising the corporate banner.

“I’ve interviewed with six different companies, and what I found is that they aren’t hiring or they’re being more selective,” Devan said. “I’ve had seven years’ experience working, and they want to hire people with less experience, people they can pay less.

“Honestly, I’m looking for just about anything now,” said the mother of three who just learned that her husband, UCI’s women’s track coach, will be laid off July 1 due to anticipated UC budget cutbacks.

“I have to try to be calm about it. I could just go crazy, but I have to remain calm, use some of these strategies for job searching and plot it all out,” she said. “And when I think about it, too, I know there are people far worse off than we are.”