Arnie Levine, a Chicago recruiter of computer professionals, has seen the job market for software engineers grow steadily over the past several years. And with that growth has come corresponding increases in salaries.
“They’re getting very high. My sons are right around 30, and I wish they were just coming out of college,” Levine said. “You have kids coming out of college who can land jobs in the $60,000-a-year range.”
Levine isn’t alone in predicting a bright future for software engineers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has identified computer engineers, including both hardware and software engineers, as the single fastest-growing occupation in the country. Approximately 299,000 computer engineers were employed in 1998, reports the BLS. That number is expected to surge to 622,000 by 2008, a 108 percent increase.
It’s the software rather than hardware side of computer engineering that is growing the fastest, say computer industry recruitment experts.
Software engineers design and develop the computer programs used to control and automate management, business and manufacturing processes. They may also be responsible for creating customized software programs for their clients. While programming skills are generally one of their strengths, their real skills lie in identifying solutions to programming problems.
“The IT (Information technology) industry has changed quite a bit over the years,” said Levine, an account executive at Chicago’s Roy Talman & Associates, which specializes in recruitment of IT professionals for the client-server and e-commerce industries.
“Instead of software engineers writing specific packages, they’re writing parts of packages, which are then tied together. For instance, they are now writing front ends of applications to make them especially easy to use, because today’s users are business people, not data processors. Then there’s another group of software engineers who may write the back ends and middles of packages. The packages are then tied together,” possibly by another engineer altogether.
In recruiting software engineers, Levine typically seeks a minimum of a bachelor’s degree, ideally in computer science or engineering. “We’re looking for someone with the stick-to-it-iveness to have stayed in college,” he said. “We’re also looking for someone who can hit the ground running. That means they’re knowledgeable in skill sets applicable in the Microsoft client-server world or the UNIX world.”
Certification is increasingly sought by recruiters as well. “We do look for people who are certified in specific areas of development,” Levine said. “If they’re Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers, that’s a major plus when we’re working in the Microsoft client-server area. And if they’re JAVA certified, that would be a plus in the UNIX world.”
In addition to earning top-of-the-line starting salaries, software engineers enjoy rapid salary growth. Levine said individuals with two years experience are often able to command $70,000 annual salaries, plus stock options and bonuses.
“It gets to six figures pretty rapidly,” he added.
For more information:
Contact the New York City-based Association for Computing Machinery at 212-869-7440 or www.acm.org. The Washington, D.C.-based IEEE Computer Society can be reached at 202-371-0101 or www.computer.org.
SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Salary: $49,000 to $67,500
Education/Training: Bachelor’s degree minimum
Outlook: The fastest-growing occupation in America
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