The engineering professions have been hard hit by the recession; especially Civil Engineering. Employers are just not hiring engineers that they were several years ago. But believe it or not there a few companies out there who are looking for your expertise.

Researching some of the top engineering job posting sites on the internet, one can quickly see that the number of job postings has been drastically reduced compared to several years ago. In my state of Nevada it is extremely hard to find any postings, but other states like California and Texas the postings are much better.

If we break-up the United States into the 5 basic geographic areas; Northwest, Mid-west, Northeast, Southeast and Southwest, which area would fair better on new job postings for Civil Engineers? We could get a rough idea by researching the main job posting websites on the internet, and calculate the following: the number of civil engineering job postings, number jobs in geographical areas, and the states with the highest number of job postings.

After reviewing several sites a pattern emerged that was a little surprising. The initial results showed that the number of listings were extremely low. States like Rhode Island and South Dakota would consistently show zero to extremely low number of listings. Usually States like Delaware, Kentucky, North Dakota, and West Virginia would have only 1 or 2 listings.

Every website that we researched resulted in the southwest region having the highest number of job postings. In each analysis California’s and Texas’s high job postings carried the southwest region to the lead.

1. Southwest Region – According to the various websites, this region had the highest number of job postings. About 70% of those postings were found in California and Texas.

2. Southeast Region – This region’s job posting numbers were very close to the Southwest region numbers. The number of job postings seemed to be a little more spread across the States in this region. Florida, Virginia, and Washington DC area typically had the highest number of postings.

3. Northeast Region – The states of New Jersey, Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania typical had the highest job postings in this region, but Rhode Island and Vermont were usually the lowest.

4. Mid West Region – This region has the most number of states, and consistently showed very low job postings. On average Illinois’s and Ohio’s posting numbers were about half the regions total number of postings.

5. Northwest Region – This region had the poorest results on all of the website surveys. The only State that is doing fairly well is Washington which has about 75% of all posting in the region.

How can you use the results of the survey? Without question the recession is still impacting the engineering profession as is clearly demonstrated by our survey. The best place to look for a Civil Engineering job right now is probably California, Florida, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas or the Washington DC area. It just doesn’t look like engineering companies anywhere else in the country are hiring.