Job Seeker Information

Are you in the market for Anchorage Alaska Jobs? The good news is that our northernmost state has plenty of work available for engineers.

It wasn’t always easy to attract quality engineers to work in Alaska, what with the state’s long winters and dark daylight hours and relative lack of creature comforts. Even though there are a lot of things not to like about Alaska on the face of it, Alaska experienced tremendous growth in the second half of the 20th century, with cities such as Anchorage growing by as much as 13 times, due largely to engineering feats such as the securing of a clean, reliable, unfrozen water supply, increasing amounts of well-paved roads, and the implementation of gravity sewers. Another major factor was the building of a huge natural gas pipeline from the Kenai fields, which gave the professional community working in Anchorage access to a clean, reliable, safe source of energy, making the dangerous yet ubiquitous floor stove obsolete. What did all of these projects have in common? They needed skilled engineers to be successfully carried out!

Engineers are in high demand in Alaska; the state’s environmental challenges ensure that there will always be engineering tasks to carry out. All one has to do is look at any industry-specific publication, Association web site, or engineering job board to determine that engineers and surveyors are always going to be in demand in America’s northernmost state. There are surely more Alaska engineering jobs available than there are people to fill them, as people in the industry are reporting an increase in the amount of firms trying to lure them away from positions they already hold to work in Alaska instead. This is a natural outcome of the fact that engineers are always needed no matter what the economic climate may be.

The outlook for Anchorage jobs is good for several reasons, the first being that an increasing amount of Federal money is being allocated for new projects in oil and gas acquisition there. Expansion of infrastructure, construction of utility pipelines and the desire to exploit new sources of oil and natural gas ensure that there will be many large-scale engineering projects going on in Alaska, and for quite a while as well. Among young people, engineering isn’t really seen as a “cool” or desirable profession, so as older veteran engineers retire, there are fewer college graduates coming in behind them to take their jobs.

Alaska has a very extreme climate, and along with that there are limited transportation networks and logistical infrastructure. All of Alaska’s’ difficult working conditions crystallize to forma need for increasingly ingenuous engineers- you won’t be working in a cube; instead, you’ll be out in the field on the cutting edge of design, earning the respect of those who understand the difficult challenges of working in Alaska.