MUNICH, Germany — While many automotive tier ones currently try to reduce their staff, Bosch group (Stuttgart, Germany) is hiring engineers for several activities.

According to its corporate website, Bosch currently seeks eight electronic engineers for development and design activities in the area of fuel cell-driven vehicles and the related drive electronics. The desired qualification profiles include power electronics, energy management, communications technologies, and physics as well as embedded software skills. The respective design activities will take place in Buehl (Germany), hence German language knowledge is "beneficial", as a Bosch spokesperson explained.

The spokesperson said that the company is hiring despite the current crisis since long-term development for many technologies starts now. All corporate postgraduate and doctorate programs are continued without curtailing. However, the company is somewhat more careful to announce job offerings. "The financial crisis is affecting us all", the spokesperson said. "For this reason we have to examine very careful how many persons we can hire."

Nevertheless, Bosch will probably hire many more engineers in the foreseeable future. During the current year, the company plans to ramp up a new ASIC production line in Reutlingen (Germany). Then the company will have demand for design engineers, the spokesperson said. And Bosch's automotive segment is not the only one that has use for EE's: "We also are looking for good engineers for photovoltaics and renewable energies," the spokesperson hinted.