For electronic engineers and specialists wanting to work anywhere in the world, Cambridge is a good potential route to Heathrow.

The employment pages of ARM is offering Europe, Far East, India and US vacancies, and it is worth studying to see the hot spots.

In Europe, email your CV to five ARM offices for posts in Aachen (two), Cambridge (32 jobs, many summer placements), Grenoble (five design engineers and CAD), Maidenhead (four), Munich (one sales engineer), Sheffield (three) and Trondheim (nine heavily in graphics software).

Six more offices, Blackburn, Kfra Saba, Leuven, Paris, Slovenia and Sophia have no current jobs, but this can change daily.

For India, ARM Bangalore has 36 technical posts and one university relations’ co-ordinator advertised.

In Beijing, Seoul, Shanghai, Shin-Yokohama and Taipei there are currently no vacancies, as is the case in the US, Boston, Cary, Detroit, Plano, San Diego, and Olympia. But in Austin there are five vacancies, Irvine and Seattle have one each, and Sunnyvale has 12, ranging from director of business strategy, network administration, design engineer to licensing manager.

Bill Parsons, executive v-p of HR globally, says ARM is currently consolidating a 2006 growth of more than 300 staff. In Cambridge, specifically, the shortages include modelling and compiler engineers. “We don’t expect to find these all locally, but also use our global recruitment network to resource skills,” says Parsons.

Cambridge Display Technology (CDT), also IP and global oriented, appears to be focused strictly locally wanting eleven staff from support technical and ink jet print assistants, senior break-through scientist, BEOL engineer to IT system administrator. CDT is a diffident communicator, but its website provides recruitment email contacts.

Making no bones about shortages in wireless and embedded software, Cambridge Consultants recently held an open day to win 16 wireless designers in Cambridge. Visitors did not even need a CV to attend. In Boston, it is seeking eight for the medical technology division.

Richard Traherne, head of Cambridge Consultants’ wireless division, notes a huge increase in the application of wireless technology. This is not just in the traditional telecoms areas but also in other markets such as healthcare and industrial automation, while the expertise pool is slow to keep up.

“In our business we need the very best designers to deliver our projects. The most difficult to find are IC designers, embedded software developers and DSP experts,” says Traherne, adding that the company does use recruitment experts and hosts recruitment events for the most elusive skills.

Logistics of location however are excellent, Traherne says. Both Cambridge and Boston are high technology clusters that offer a “great lifestyle” with “global travel, working in a range of industry sectors and with clients ranging from start-ups to blue chips”.

Ian Nicholson, principal scientist at TWI, who currently runs the collaborative ten-organisation, four-technology, Microscan project for PCB defect detection, is based with the project in Port Talbot, Wales, and admits to struggling to recruit locally. “Regarding recruitment at our HQ in Cambridge and our specific needs, there are too many applicants rather than too few,” he notes, wistfully.

Pamela Connelly, admin manager for TeraView, the Toshiba Europe Labs spin-off which is working on terahertz frequency adds: “The principal difficulties in recruitment are software engineers and specialist physicists/life sciences graduates, with specific expertise and proven commercial experience.”

For nanotechnology firm Akubio, which has received £826,000 of Government support to develop resonant acoustic profiling of viruses and bacteria, the current need is for one senior applications scientist. But in the field of micro-robotics, which uses software and electronics engineers, production and admin staff, there are currently no vacancies.

It is a digital wireless, embedded software, and specialist applications scientist world out there for the Cambridge electronics community.