Evidence on the capabilities employers pay for, and the fastest honest route to proving yours.
What to learn, how to prove it, and where it leads.
46 dossiers
Fifteen evidence checks, five layers, one benchmark per role, and a reading plan drawn from our dossiers.
French chemistry reports recruitment difficulty for operator and technician roles at 33% against 17% for engineers, while a Seveso platform is dismantled thirty kilometres from a semiconductor valley that buys the same discipline at a higher tolerance. The transfer, and its limits.
Attritable production engineering, certified and beyond-visual-line-of-sight flight operations, autonomy in GNSS-denied air, and defence-grade programme governance: derived from what Delair has shipped and certified, with every salary and staffing claim refused.
Crolles is under a multi-year voluntary-departure plan while a €10m microelectronics training programme runs to 2028 and an FD-SOI academy opens next door. That is not a contradiction: it is a stock and a flow, and it tells a candidate what to optimise for.
Read the products and the dated deliveries, not the careers page. Named signalling standards, sequenced plant variants, real plant control equipment and certified real-time 3D: four demands the shipped work proves, with every salary claim refused.
Read the job board, not the press releases. The three families that recur are infrastructure engineering, enterprise deployment and AI science, and the science roles are posted in six cities across five countries, which changes the calculation for anyone outside Paris.
Read the plant and the postings, not the sector. Vacuum process and photocathode discipline, five acquired detection physics, FPGA work next to the sensor, and the scale-up functions a first US line demands, with every salary claim refused.
Read the tooling, not the job board. Aledia’s 300 mm MOCVD choice puts its process competences in the same language as the Isère silicon base, which is why the career risk of a single-product fab is lower than it looks.
Inocel supplies the fuel cell; Equans containerises it. That published boundary means power electronics, thermal design, controls and hydrogen safety decide delivery, and the design roles sit in Saint-Égrève while the factory roles sit 400 km away.
Échirolles changed brand in January 2026 and owner in March. The stack did not: SLURM, Kubernetes, Lustre, C on Linux, BXI networking and Arm toolchains are named in the exascale contract itself. Three dated vacancies show what the site actually buys, and none of them publishes a salary.
The sector must recruit 100,000 full-time equivalents by 2035, half of it replacement, and two hires in three sit between CAP and Bac+3 while 48% of today’s workforce is graduate-level. Civil engineering hires now; electromechanical assembly hires from 2028.
Fifteen thousand medical devices a year, a premium position that must be proved rather than priced, a spectral imaging programme with public research, and a cooperative accelerator whose declared service is certification. Seven competencies, three candidate profiles, and no invented salary bands.
High mix, low volume, traceable per part: a plant that runs 2,500 lots a year of 30 to 200 components buys different skills from one that runs a single recipe for a decade. Seven competencies, three candidate profiles, and no invented salary bands.
