Engineering jobs
If you wish to continue in engineering, your career options are heavily influenced by your degree type, and you are probably already aware of many of them. As an example:
Graduates in civil engineering design and maintain roads, railroads, dams, and foundations.
Chemical engineering graduates often work in development in the manufacturing business, designing materials and developing production methods for anything from medicines to airplanes.
Mechanical engineering graduates are generalists in the engineering industry, working in a wide variety of sectors.
Graduates of materials engineering generate novel materials or enhance the performance of current ones.
Electrical engineering graduates deal with and maintain electrical systems and equipment.
Petroleum engineering graduates work in the oil and gas industries to ensure that extraction is as efficient as possible.
Biomedical engineering graduates are active in ensuring the safety of medical goods and in the development of new medical technology.
Technical sales engineering graduates work inside the company, ensuring that customers understand how to utilize the goods for which they are accountable and bringing on new clients.
Examine the many engineering careers available.
Your engineering degree does not restrict you to these positions. Outside of engineering, you have several choices.
Consulting
Consultants are outside specialists who are brought in to help a firm address an issue. The diversity of job is what draws people to consulting. You will visit other organizations, see how they operate, give your answer, and then on to the next challenge. So, how can you become a consultant right out of college when you're not yet an expert?
As an engineering graduate, you have two alternatives in the consulting field: expert engineering consultation or a non-specific employment that does not need a certain degree.
Many large management consulting companies provide the latter. They provide well-known, established graduate programs that can help you enhance your talents and transition from an engineer to a business expert. The similar procedure is used by consulting engineers.
You may start working in engineering consulting right out of university, taking on basic jobs while gaining the experience you'll need to be a lead consultant on a project.
Writing for technical audiences
Scientists and engineers aren't recognized for their ability to communicate well — the cliché is someone spewing unintelligible technobabble. While this is primarily hyperbole, there is a big demand for experts who can organize technical material into something that a certain audience can grasp.
You could fill that need if you're an engineering graduate with a penchant for writing. Technical writers work on instruction manuals, textbooks, journal articles, product catalogs, and anything else that requires technical communication. A skilled technical writer can write for any audience, from the general public to a group of specialized engineers.
The adaptability of technical writing is a major draw. While many will have a normal 9-to-5 office job, there are other opportunities to work from home, as a freelancer, or part-time.
Business
You may believe that a business degree is required to become a CEO, but you'd be mistaken. While many top US CEOs have an MBA, almost as many hold a degree in engineering.
As an engineering graduate, you're likely to have gained good project-planning abilities as a result of your practical work, as well as learned to communicate well and work well in a team. You'll be well-suited for jobs that might lead to a senior management position — for example, a basic role in underwriting at an insurance business can lead to a team management role, then an operations management role, and finally to the position of head of operations.
Adding an MBA diploma to your engineering degree, for example, can help you solve the bigger and less organized difficulties you'll confront when you're at the top of the pile.
Banking on investments
Are you drawn to investment banking because of the money and prestige? It is definitely a viable choice for engineering grads. You're obviously good with statistics, a problem solver, and you pay attention to the smallest details. You also offer a new viewpoint to a table full of economists and mathematicians. Employers will be interested in you if you are really the perfect person for the job.
Passion for finance is a fundamental qualification for becoming an investment banker. How else are you going to work an eighteen-hour day and then wake up when it's still dark to see how the markets fared overnight? To obtain that crucial summer internship, you must explain why you would not be happy with a simpler, higher-paying career as an engineer.
Law
When you chat to legal firms at a jobs fair, you'll discover that they don't have a preference for law grads. Indeed, several prominent legal firms state that half of their attorneys came from a different path. A trainee attorney will benefit much from an engineering graduate's analytical thinking and practical mentality.
To enter the legal profession with an engineering degree, you must first finish a one-year conversion course known as the graduate diploma in law (GDL). If you acquire a training contract, your company may pay for it. Otherwise, you'll have to take a chance and finance it yourself. You might also start working as a legal secretary right away. If you decide to take the GDL later on, the experience you earn will be quite helpful.
One downside of being an engineering student is that you may lack the abilities required to investigate and formulate an argument generated by essay topics such as history and sociology. If you're interested in law, consider what you've done to display these qualities and what you might do to improve them. To understand more about commercial law, see Bright Network's Career Path Guide.
Production and manufacturing
Manufacturing is the industrial process of converting raw resources into final goods. Roles in the industry include everything that maintains a factory operating, running smoothly, and creating high-quality goods.
Manufacturing businesses are desperate for engineering graduates, and there are fantastic initiatives available to help you get started. P&G, for example, provides summer internships for students studying electrical, mechanical, manufacturing, industrial, chemical, material, or process engineering. Most large corporations, from pharmaceutical manufacturing to the automobile sector, provide comparable internships and graduate programs.
There are also many positions where an engineering degree is advantageous but not required, such as manufacturing floor management, quality control, and safety.
Logistics and supply chain management
Following manufacture, the following stage is to bring things to their final destination, which is generally on a shelf in front of customers. This is part of the supply chain process, which also involves delivering raw materials to the manufacturer and storing goods in warehouses at any point along the chain.
This whole system requires a large number of people to keep it functioning, from those who oversee specific warehouses to those who design computer models that determine the most effective method to transport something from point A to point B. Though it may be a sector you seldom consider, it is one of the biggest in the UK, employing around 2 million people.
As an engineer, you will be a desirable candidate for graduate programs at a wide range of firms. Retailers like Ocado, manufactures like L'Oréal, and oil and gas corporations like BP — practically every sector has a need for logistics graduates. A graduate programme pay is typically between £20,000 and £25,000. Later on, your compensation will be heavily influenced by the job you choose. Learn more about operations and the supply chain.