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Engineering

May 2025 Market Intel

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2025.05 Fidelis Market Intel

 

US National Unemployment Remained Steady at 4.2%

The US national unemployment rate remained steady at 4.2%. Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 139,000 in May, similar to the average monthly gain of 149,000 over the past 12 months. The total number of unemployed persons remained at 7.2 million. In May, 1.5 million people were considered long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27+ weeks); long-term accounts for 20.4% of all unemployed people. In May, the labor force participation rate decreased to 62.4%. and the employment-population ratio decreased slightly to 59.7%.

Job Growth Sectors:

The following industry sectors saw notable job change in May:

  • Healthcare (+62K)
  • Leisure and Hospitality (+48K)
  • Social Assistance (+16K)
  • Government (-22K)

In May, healthcare led job growth reflects strong demand for medical professionals. Leisure and hospitality jobs increased as travel and entertainment remained steady, while social assistance grew in order to support essential services.

In contrast, government employment declined, likely due to budget shifts and seasonal changes. Overall, service industries continue to drive job growth, with healthcare and hospitality leading the way.

Wage Growth:

Average hourly earnings increased by 0.4% in May, maintaining a trend of wage growth over the past 12 months.

Educational Attainment:

  • Unemployment for persons with less than a high school diploma decreased to 5.5%. This sector remains the highest unemployment rate based on level of education.
  • High school graduates with no college increased slightly to 4.5% in May.
  • Those with some college decreases slightly to 3.3%
  • Bachelor’s degree and higher remained the lowest group and changed little to 2.6%.

Major Markets

  • Of the top 5 major US markets, DFW unemployment remained the lowest at 3.5%.
  • 4 out of 5 US markets had a MoM decrease.
  • Of the top 5 major US markets, Houston and Los Angeles saw the largest YoY decrease in unemployment of 20 bps.

Employment Changes in Key Metropolitan Areas

Over the year, nonfarm payroll employment increased in 20 metropolitan areas, decreased in 1 area, and was essentially unchanged in 366 areas

The most significant employment gains occurred in:

  • New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA: Added 96,100 jobs.
  • Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX: Gained 52,100 jobs.
  • Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD: Increased by 35,800 jobs.

 

Why does your company need a consultant?

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Why do YOU need a business consultant? To provide solutions to specific challenges, to constructively criticize, to facilitate new systems, to implement new business ideas, or to bring in an experienced outsiders evaluation and point of view? Maybe your company is working on a challenging problem or project and needs an unbiased opinion. Our consultants will not let you down.

A company normally comes to consultants because they are great at these 5 things:

  • Separating people from the problems
  • Focusing on interests, not positions
  • Generating a variety of possibilities
  • Creating evaluation criteria
  • Solving problems

Consultants generate options before deciding. Sometimes clients jump to conclusions because they have been in the industry for many, many years, or because “it has always been done that way”. Consultants are more willing to start with a blank white sheet of paper and begin brainstorming.

Consultants are really good at generating options because they spend the time getting the data and really thinking through the problems at hand. At the beginning of a project, consultants look at all potential scenarios, and look for hypotheses everywhere.

▪  They brainstorm new ideas; at this stage no ideas are ruled out

▪  They interview people up & down the org chart

▪  They keep asking “why” until they get to the core reason

▪  They dig until they get to the root causes and find out what the real drivers are

▪  They reach out to industry experts who know the larger trends

It’s very common for consultants to structure multiple options for the client to choose from. This acknowledges that there are multiple potential solutions, but there are trade-offs.  It really depends on the clients’ time frame, appetite for risk, budget, and opinion. There is often 1 primary recommendation, but multiple implementation options.

There are many different types of consultants, whether you’re a small or big company, there is someone out there who will help you get to where you want to be. Here at Fidelis Companies, we specialize in Engineering, Life Sciencesa, and IT. SiteSuite came out with 4 main types of consultants:

  1. Specialist – world class capabilities in selected area
  2. Game changer – game changing answers that no one else can provide
  3. Vendor – adequate performance + low cost + no hassle
  4. Total solution provider – total package from a reliable supplier

Flash Memory Summit

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3D_XPoint_DieThe Flash Memory Summit is the only place where you will hear the people making these products happen! Network with companies and people that will create the next generation of hardware and software.  The main companies who participated in the Flash Memory Summit include: SK Hynix, Seagate, Sandisk, HP, PMC-Sierra, NetApp, Toshiba, Violin Memory, and Cadence. 

Last week, Fidelis Companies’ Engineering Practice Lead, James Roberts and Engineering Recruiter, Mary Helen Corrigan, attended this conference in California, where over 6,500 attendees and 100 exhibitors were in attendance, proving that memory and storage markets are booming. The most notable “buzz” the Fidelis team heard at the educational conference was regarding Micron’s new X-Point Memory. Link to the exciting new technology and check it out: https://www.micron.com/about/innovations/3d-xpoint-technology

The conference covered a variety of topics and sessions:

  • Half-day seminars on: error-correcting codes, PCI Express, NVMe, and SSDs introductions
  • Full day forums on: flash memory-based architectures, NVMe and PCIe SSDs, and controllers
  • Half-day forums on enterprise SSDs, enterprise caching, enterprise applications, PCIe power budgets, virtualization, client caching, data centers, and PCIe storage

There were at least six major companies with exhibits that are target companies where we find/recruit ASIC, FW, Applications & Technical Marketing talent for our engineering team’s best customer. We attended the conference to find new engineering talent and to explore new business. There were many companies that were new to us, which isn’t surprising since we worked our first search assignments for storage-related development a little over a year ago. Our goal is take advantage of the new technologies and add memory related searches to our offerings.

Most of their time at the conference was spent checking out different companies and technologies, gathering personal info on people to call back upon their return to the office, and networking around the exhibit hall.

Reflecting back on the conference, they have numerous takeaways:

  • Retrieved around 150 names of engineers and technical marketing professionals from target companies for future networking
  • Learned more about the storage and memory technologies and markets (i.e. XPoint)
  • Met people in person that they’ve known over the phone for years, and started building new relationships