Basic Qualifications:
• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science or related technical focus.
• Experience in COMM and Navigation.
• Avionics experience
• Experience with aircraft operations.
• Microsoft Office
I love the MS Office req at the end. "Yes, we see you've got a BS in engineering, you're an expert at avionics and COMM control systems, but do you know anything about MS Word?"
If his resume didn’t say anything about MS Office, then he’d be screened out by HR and the managers would never get to consider him. So, that conversation would never happen.
They are probably just sick of having photos in documents that have been stretched horizontally, or documents with bloody manually created tables of contents because the last person didn't know how to use heading styles.
What kind of impression that leaves with your customer when your studies are so badly formated? And you need a lot of people to properly format the thousands upon thousands of documents...
It indicates that writing and editing thousands of pages of documentation will be contractually required. Word proficiency can save a lot of pain for everyone on that team.
An acquaintance who worked in QA for a foundry producing alloy castings for the aerospace industry swore they shipped a greater weight of paper than metal.
More like: "We ended up hiring the guy most competent at MS Word at the expense of everything else, because out of the five requirements it was the only one the managers doing the interview knew anything about".
"Johnson! We're promoting you to head technical flight operations. We can't believe the level of your MS Word skills!"
"Senator, we have no idea why the F-22 inexplicably crashed. That software was designed by the best people we could find!".
The guy that designed the flight control surfaces of the F-22 did so using an elaborate Excel spreadsheet powered by 4,000 lines of uncommented VBA filled with aerodynamics equations, and he retired 3 years ago.
I actually had a phone interview (for a government-contract IT support position....basic call center/help desk type stuff, I just needed a job) that went pretty much just like that.
I explained to the recruiter "while working on my Masters I did some General-Purpose GPU coding using CUDA, as well as software-defined radio systems using GNU Radio". I could tell she had no clue what any of that meant. She then asked me to revise and resubmit my resume because it didn't list 6 years of experience with MS Office. -_-
EDIT: My resume had my experience as a commissioned officer on it, and any DoD recruiter worth a damn should know that all officers are Black Belts in PowerPoint Slideology.
I don't see much point in asking for an office package in a job advert. But a lot of jobs do require use of these packages and the level of skill can be terrible in otherwise highly trained people. If you use the apps a lot you should learn how to use them properly, and a lot of people just can't be bothered.
I know it's kinda trivial, but I strongly agree with this. For example, inheriting a set of Word/Google docs where all the formatting is applied locally without the use of styles. So I can't turn on the outliner or generate a table of contents. Or not including a proper footer with page numbers in n/nn format so that if I print them out and drop them I know how to put them back together. Or having decent metadata in so you can find them on file system searches. Ugh.
One time, I was given an Excel doc with a bunch of numbers and totals and averages in. I updated some values, only to find none of the calculations changed. The creator simply hadn't used any formulas, or had pasted it all in as plain text from some other place!
Who's more likely to know (or be able to figure out, in 3.5 minutes) how to use Word text styles? The candidate who has room in the "skills" section for MS-Word, or the candidate who has actual skills to list?
You're reading the job description all wrong...you've got to think like a hiring manager in the defense industry to make any sense of it, i.e. reverse qualification priorities and the actual job you'll be hired to perform will become crystal clear.
AS a Systems Engineer in the Defense industry I completely agree. It is only because we talk about a maintenance role that DOORS doesn’t come on the list with Word.
DOORS the standard tool for requirements management that combines the worst technologies IBM has to offer in order to provide you with a way of entering hypertext into a database.
DOORS is probably the reason I can't go back to the Aero industry. It still haunts my dreams. I would rather work on maintaining Excel VBA scripts rather than go back to DOORS. DXL was a goddamn nightmare.
• Experience in COMM and Navigation.
• Avionics experience
• Experience with aircraft operations.
• Microsoft Office
I love the MS Office req at the end. "Yes, we see you've got a BS in engineering, you're an expert at avionics and COMM control systems, but do you know anything about MS Word?"