A Job Marketplace for Signal Processing Professionals

Alex Acero
SPS Director of Industrial Relations

In 2009, the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) revised its SPS Bylaws by establishing a new Membership Board with the goal of providing SPS members with more benefit and more value to meet their changing demand. The 2010 IEEE SPS long-range strategic retreat was held in September 2010 during IEEE ICIP 2010 in Hong Kong, where how to better serve the needs of our SPS members was the central theme of the retreat discussion, especially our student members and industry members. The retreat identified a list of action items as new initiatives for better serving the SPS members, including bringing the visibility of SP to the general public and attracting more student and industry members. (More details can be found in the featured article of the December 2010 eNews issue “Think Long-Range for Signal Processing Society” by President-Elect Ray Liu.) Through our recent ICASSP surveys we have learnt that roughly 25% of ICASSP attendees are students, and that many of them are interested in meeting potential employers. Many industry members go to ICASSP to recruit potential employees. Because of this, as an initiative to better meet the need of SP industry and serving our student members, we decided to investigate having a job marketplace in the Society that allows employers to post job announcements for industry or academic positions, both full-time and internships, in various areas of signal processing.

It turns out that back in 2003, Rick Rose started a Newsletter for the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC), which had its first jobs section in the April 2004 issue. The volume of job announcements grew steadily under the stewardship of SLTC Newsletter editor-in-chief Mike Seltzer first, and Jason Williams later. With the help of Rupal Bhatt, the SPS’s webmaster, the SLTC Job Marketplace was revamped in 2010 Fall to reduce the load of the SLTC webmasters. Leveraging the SLTC experiences, Rupal Bhatt built a streamlined mechanism for employers to add a job announcement by simply filling in a simple webform (e.g. filling the SLTC Job Opportunity Submission Form, where the only manual step by the SLTC webmaster is to vet whether the entry is legitimate). Now more than half of our SPS TCs have job marketplaces:

• SLTC Job Opportunities,
• Image, Video and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IVMSP) TC Job Opportunites,
• Information Forensics and Security (IFS) TC Job Opportunities,
• Audio and Acoustic Signal (AASP) TC Job Opportunites,
• Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) TC Job Opportunities
• Signal Processing Theory and Methods (SPTM) TC Job Opportunities, and
• Signal Processing Communications and Networking (SPCOM) TC Job Opportunities.

Since the Inside Signal Processing eNewsletter (eNewsletter) is mean to be a gateway for different units of the SPS organizations to reach out and is considered one two important member-centric ways to reach and serve SPS members, one of the current stage focuses of  eNewsletter is to enhance /expand sections regarding Job Opportunity News and recently there also have been active discussions between the eNewsletter team led by the editor-in-chief Li Deng,  SPS Leadership, SPS TCs and Industrial Relations to achieve this goal.  As a result, a link “SPS TC Jobs Marketplace” which includes the links to individual TC job marketplaces has been added into “Research Opportunities” Section.

We take this article as a good opportunity to advertise this new job marketplace feature of SPS TCs and the eNewsletter so that companies/universities learn about this and can start posting jobs there.

You have spoken and we have listened. Please let us know what else you would like to see the Signal Processing Society do!