For anyone working in the tech industry, it pays to stay attentive to what's coming next. That's just as true for a workforce solutions provider that helps businesses and professionals in tech work together as it is for those professionals themselves. With an eye on the trends likely to overtake the tech world in the coming years, Talent 101 has just announced a new business relationship with Camber.
When it comes time for a small semiconductor company to hire new talent it can feel a bit like David gearing up to compete with Goliath. There's a limited pool of talent out there. How are the little guys supposed to compete with the giants of the electronics industry?
Wearable technology has been little by little finding its way into the lives and pocketbooks of consumers for several years now. Sales of wearable smartbands – just one small sector of the larger industry – are set to grow by 350% in 2014.
Recognizing a lucrative opportunity for growth, Texas Instruments (TI) is making moves to get in on the game. They just announced that they'll be expanding their microcontroller portfolio with the release of new ultra-low-power MSP430FR69x FRAM microcontrollers.
Musical chairs may have been fun to play as a kid, but it's no game in an office environment. To keep a business running smoothly and productively, you want every seat you fill to stay filled. When employees move to other departments or businesses, you lose.
How Temporary Contract Positions Can Help Your Long-Term Semiconductor Career
The recent recession changed the way people think about work. While many of the effects of the recession were clearly negative, one of the benefits to come out of it is a broadening of how people view their professional prospects. The past five years have seen an increase in graduate school attendees, the self-employed, and temporary contract workers.
That latter group has grown by about 9% in the last year, according to a survey performed by the American Staffing Association (ASA). While temporary contract positions offer some clear benefits to semiconductor businesses, it may be harder for engineering job candidates with dreams of steady, full-time work to see the appeal. Nonetheless, those temporary positions can pay off for the worker, as well as the company that hires him or her.
In the semiconductor industry, you're not just competing against other companies when it comes to making sales. Hiring a top-notch team of semiconductor engineers is a feat in and of itself.
The hiring process can be a pain in any industry, but in one as competitive as the semiconductor industry it takes on a new level of difficulty. The fact is, you're busy.
A recent counterfeit semiconductor scare proves a distressing reminder that not only do counterfeit semiconductor chips exist, they can make it into the hands of people working on some of the most sophisticated projects out there. If fake and potentially dangerous semiconductor chips can come so close to being used by the U.S. Navy, they could be anywhere.
For those of us who understand how much goes into the process of developing semiconductor chips, the fact that counterfeit products could even exist is confounding. The prohibitive cost of FAB equipment and the complexity of the processes and technology required should be enough to keep con artists out of the game. Yet somehow someone's figured out a way to counterfeit the process in a ploy to make more money, which puts us all at risk.
Semiconductor projects require a very specialized kind of knowledge. Talent recruitment for semiconductor positions can be very competitive, which makes it all too tempting to settle quickly on a new candidate for a position in your company. A hire that's not a good fit will eat up time, energy and resources though, so you should minimize the risk by bringing a little more caution into the hiring phase.
Contract-to-hire positions are pretty standard in the tech industry and can be beneficial to both the company and the candidate. Personality conflicts or a mismatch in what the candidate knows and what the company needs are bad for everyone. To build a stronger semiconductor team, giving people a try before the commitment of a full-time employee position can help for three simple reasons.
The best semiconductor professionals know how important it is to be on top of what's happening in the industry. For you to be the best at what you do, you want to be aware of the work your colleagues are performing as well.
With that in mind, we'll be helping to cover company news and product updates for businesses making a splash in the semiconductor industry, starting today with AMD's new performance mobile Accelerated Processing Units (APU).
