Engineer on minimum wage at Beer Store: Betina Hodak has struggled finding work in her field after a 2013 layoff.

• Author: Migneault, Jonathan

Betina Hodak is a professional engineer, but works part-time at a Beer Store in Sudbury.

She has struggled since 2013 to find work in her field.

Hodak graduated from the University of Western Ontario in 2000 with an electrical engineering degree, did some contract work in Windsor in automotive engineering in vehicle quality support, but was laid off from the Ford Motor Company after five years.

She later found a job in London, as an electrical engineer, where she commuted each day from Windsor.

But Hodak was laid off from that job in 2008, the year she was licensed as an electrical engineer.

"I was told it didn't seem I was committed to the job because I hadn't moved," Hodak said.

In 2012, Hodak and her husband Mark, also an engineer, relocated to Sudbury, where she was able to land a job with Tracks and Wheels, a mining and construction equipment manufacturer.

After she was laid off from that job in 2013, she has continuously applied for engineering jobs, but has rarely ever gotten calls back.

"Some of the circumstances in which my wife lost her job never sat well with us," said Mark.

One of her layoffs, he said, was after she had returned from maternity leave. Hodak and her husband contacted the Ministry of Labour, and the case ended up going to arbitration, where they eventually reached a settlement with the company.

As part of their agreement with the company, they can't discuss the settlement's terms.

Mark is employed as a mechanical engineer, and is able to support their family--they have three children--with his salary, but said they still live modestly with Betina only working part-time, and making minimum wage.

Betina said she often applies for engineering positions that remain unfilled months later.

Sandro Perruzza, the CEO of the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, said it is a common practice for companies to post jobs so they can build a database of potential candidates in case they get a big contract that requires a hiring spree.

But if those big contracts never come, the positions remain unfilled.

The Ontario Society of Professional Engineers recently published a report on what it calls a crisis of underemployment among the province's engineering degree holders.

Using data from the 2011 Canadian National Census--the latest data available the society found that in Ontario, only 29.7 per cent of individuals with engineering degrees worked as engineers or engineering managers.

Around 33 per cent of engineers in Ontario...