I have a chemical engineering degree, hundreds of job applications, and 9 months of searching, and I still don't have a real engineering job. I've had several interviews that led nowhere except for one offer that wasn't the right fit. At this point, I genuinely don't know what else I can do. Is the market really this bad right now, or is there something I should be doing differently?

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The market really is that bad right now.

I ran a lab for 30 years and it got bought by a big corp who downsized the long-standing staff. Been months and only 2 interviews, neither in my field. One was a laborer on a chem plant and the other was medical research.

Manufacturing is dead in the USA.

Good thing I have backup skills and side things! I'm back to making websites, but am self taught so can't get a real job doing it. The only people who'll hire me are churches and porn sites. What a resume! But it shows I can work with anybody.

I wonder if I'll ever work in a lab again...

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Reports of Manufacturing death, in the United States, are greatly exaggerated. I just landed my dream job in my dream location on Florida’s Space Coast.
Space/Aerospace/Defense are hot right now. Due to the war in Iran, just blew through three years of production on some weapons programs. I would look at those companies.

This tracks with my experience as a chemical engineer. Expect to get your first engineering gig 5 years after you graduate, and your first good paying engineering gig 10 years after you graduate.

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Nine months is brutal, but I don't think it automatically means you’re doing something wrong. Engineering hiring feels extremely inconsistent right now. I know talented people who took close to a year to land something solid.

Are you in a job at the moment? Is there any way to move around within your current job to something more related?

9 months and hundreds of apps usually means somethings getting filtered way before a human sees it, or the resume is too broad for the roles youre applying to. I'd start by checking 2 things first: is your resume actually mirroring the exact wording in the job post, and is it passing cleanly through ATS parsing (especially if you use any tables, text boxes, headers, weird formatting, etc). I had a friend with a chem eng degree who kept getting ghosted until we stripped the fancy layout and rewrote bullets to match each posting way more closely.

Also worth narrowing the search a bit if youre not already. ChemE can branch into process, quality, validation, EHS, manufacturing, even sales support, and a lot of entry roles dont really say "chemical engineer" in the title. Sometimes the job title is the trap, not your degree.

If you want a quick sanity check, run one resume against a few job descriptions and compare the keyword gaps. I used ResumeJudge alongside Resume Worded and Jobscan once and the biggest miss was a bunch of skills that were literally in the posting but not on my resume at all. Are you mostly applying to posted engineer roles, or also things like process/validation/manufacturing jobs with weird titles?

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