Boeing Recruitment and Retention Advisor Professor Mike Pope
Boeing Recruitment and Retention Advisor: Professor Mike Pope Introduction: Boeing is the world’s largest aerospace company and manufactures commercial jetliners, defense, space, and security systems. Boeing products include aircraft, satellites, weapons, defense systems, and launch systems. Currently Boeing has about 1700 open positions they are looking to fill. Boeing wanted us to look into their recruiting and retention of young talent, specifically researching emerging technologies, competitor hiring approaches, and what recent college graduates are looking for in companies. Process: To begin addressing Boeing’s overall problem of hiring and retention of young talent, we began breaking the problem into 5 activity areas we wanted to address. We chose to focus on the following activity areas, in chronological order: • Student Work Expectations • Emerging Skills in the Aerospace Industry • University Curriculums and their reflection of critical skills • Hiring Strategies of Boeing Competitors • Open Positions within Boeing in Critical/Emerging Skills Areas To assess student work expectations, we developed a survey targeting University of Alabama undergraduate students and their expectations for entry level jobs. This survey included questions on company culture, previous work experiences, and overall compensation expectations. Then, with the help of our Boeing contacts, we got opinions on some of the emerging fields within the aerospace industry that will need hiring support in the next few years. We then took these critical skills and identified any potential concentrations, classes, or specializations that schools Boeing historically recruits from. Moving on, we then sent out an anonymous survey to HR representatives for competitors of Boeing to give some feedback regarding hiring processes and offer considerations. We plan on comparing these results to several interviews we had with Boeing engineers regarding their experiences. Results: Through surveying students about their work expectations, we were able to draw several conclusions about what they prefer for future jobs. • Prefer having a large amount of technical work. • Enjoy opportunities to work closely with teams. • Want to work at a desk with opportunities to get away from it every now and then. • Highly value opportunities to move up into a supervisor or management role. • Prefer suburban or city locations. • They are okay with working more than 40 hours per week but want about 4 weeks of time off per year. • Want to work with new technology. • Would like to travel and have the freedom to work remotely. In conjunction with our contacts at Boeing, we were able to identify several critical skills in the Aerospace industry right now and that will likely develop over the next couple years. These critical skills are: Additive Manufacturing, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Design for Manufacturing, AR/VR, Model Based Engineering, Composites, Turbulent Flow Modeling, Design for Additive During our research into several top Universities and their curriculum, we were able to find which of these schools offered the most opportunities involving the previously identified critical skills. The top schools that we identified were Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and Purdue. MIT offered the most concentrations with some of them covering the critical skills. CMU’s strength was that it had several interdisciplinary minors. Purdue allowed their students to have a specialization in many of the skills we identified. We then took this information and used it to compare Alabama’s current curriculum. Alabama seems to lack some of the competitive specializations and concentrations that are offered at many other universities. We were able to complete our phone calls with the Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) at Boeing, but we are still collecting data on the survey that was sent out to the HR representatives for competitors. Once that data is collected, it will be compared to that which was collected in our calls with people at Boeing. Our project will conclude with a Team: Rob Giagnorio- Mechanical Engineering, Chicago, IL Kelsey Montgomery- Chemistry, Florence, AL Chase Trautman- Mechanical Engineering, Pittsburgh, PA Brandon Quinn- Computer Engineering, Pittsburgh, PA Thanks: Thank you to all the employees from Boeing who spoke with us and provided information for this project. Special thanks to Kim Couch, Program Operations Manager on Space Launch System, and Michelle Barber, Ground Based Midcourse Defense Program Booster Chief Engineer, for being our points of contact and working closely with us throughout the duration of this project.
- Slides: 1