Answer: You have a challenge ahead of you. Executives who apply for lesser jobs sometimes seem desperate to employers. The assumption is that these hires will leave if something better comes along.

Read the advice from the Career Journals’ experts.

Approximately 286,000 manufacturing firms currently operate in the U.S. and produce 22 percent of global manufacturing output, the largest percentage of any country.

Needless to say, the fab action is in Asia.  M+W has built some 70 percent of the 300-mm fabs in that region. But amid the outsourcing trends, coupled by the wild IC cycles, M+W has diversified over the years into data centers, energy, life sciences, and other sectors.

This year along, M+W has been on an acquisition spree as a mean to diversify.

M+W Process Automation GmbH acquired 70 percent of the shares in Teufel Software GmbH, a SAP systems house for medium-sized manufacturing companies.

M+W Americas purchased 100 percent of Global Automation Partners, which will expand its competencies for customers of FAD regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals, biotech, and specialty chemicals.

M+W acquired shares in Schmid Silicon Technology Holding GmbH to partner in worldwide activities for engineering and construction of polysilicon plants based on its monosilane technology.

M+W continues to invest in the U.S with M+W Americas recent purchase of 100 percent of NSTAR Global Services which specializes in providing contract service resources to the semiconductor and high-tech industries.

Mobile chips get almost no public recognition in a world which seems to care more about screen size, shiny aluminum casings and apps - yet without powerful application processors, our handsets and devices would be nothing more than bricks.

Making chips, however, is no easy task, nor is it a cheap one, resulting in many firms choosing to outsource their manufacturing to dedicated “fabs” to feed the almost insatiable modern appetite for smaller, faster processors.

In Singapore recently, RCR was privileged to be able to get a glimpse behind the chipmaking curtain at GlobalFoundries’ fab 7, where wafer upon wafer of chips are churned out daily from within the impressive maze of cleanrooms.

“A contractor cut a very small ammonia vapor line,” said Mark Maunder, battalion chief with the Gresham fire department.

He described the line as no bigger than a quarter-inch.

Two workers exposed to the vapor were checked out on scene and then transported to Providence Hospital in Portland as a precaution.

The leak was isolated very quickly, Maunder said.

Twenty states and the District of Columbia have larger workforces now than they did a year ago, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Ten of those states enjoyed increases of more than 10,000 jobs.