On February 10, the USPTO will host two virtual booths at the CareerBuilder.com Engineering Virtual Career Fair (VCF) online, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.  Candidates can visit the USPTO virtual “Entry Level” or “Electrical Engineering” booth to learn about USPTO and obtain key agency information such as patent examiner vacancy announcements, employee benefits, and incentives.  Candidates may also participate in live chat sessions with recruiters to obtain more detailed information about patent examiner job opportunities.

All USPTO employees are urged to help spread the word to friends and family members who may be qualified applicants.  Click here to register to participate in the Virtual Career Fair.

For more information, contact Patricia Mendoza in the Office of Human Resources at (571) 272-2813.

 A patent examiner is responsible for examining a certain quota of applications every bi-week. The quota of applications that an examiner is required to examine depends upon their GS level and which class of applications they are examining.  For example, an examiner who is a GS-7 may have a quota of 5.25 "counts" required per bi-week, while an examiner who examines in the same class and is a GS-11 would have a quota of 6.75 counts and a GS-13 would have a quota of 8.25 counts. The quota production system is a large reason why many examiners quit within their first couple years at the PTO. To be sure, it is stressful to constantly be under the gun, so to speak. Some people find a way to cope with this system and become extremely successful at managing their applications. Other people despise the constant pressure and resign. This story in the Washington Post discusses this part of the patent examiner profession: 

http://www.popa.org/pdf/misc/wpost-08oct2007.pdf

The Japanese Patent Office provides a computerized English translation of its patents that have been published from 1993 to present. To access the English translation, go HERE, click on "Number Search" in the upper right corner, enter the patent number you are searching for in the format of YY-XXXXXX or YYYY-XXXXXX, select your patent, then on the Abstracts page click on the "Detail" link at the top - this is the English translation. Because this is a just a computer translation, it is not exactly 100% reliable. Often, it is difficult to read or understand exactly what is being said, but you can get the general gist. 

Here's how I use the computer translation: Say I'm looking to see if this patent discloses a particular limitation, such as the method used to form the gate dielectric of a transistor - so I look at the translation and I find the paragraph(s) where they are talking about the gate dielectric, but it's not exactly clear from the garbled translation how the dielectric is formed; well, I write down the paragraph numbers where I think this information is and I take it to our Japanese translator on staff. Now, all I have to do is ask the translator to tell me what it says about the gate dielectric in this particular paragraph and I get the info I need immediately, instead of waiting, sometimes days, for the translator to translate the entire Japanese patent.