For many engineering graduates, the conventional path of pursuing a career in a technical or engineering role may seem like the default choice. However, that doesn’t have to be the case! The analytical skills and problem-solving mindset cultivated during your engineering studies are highly transferable, making you valuable candidates in a wide range of other career paths.
Whether you’re a fresh graduate considering your options, or a young engineer considering a career change, it’s widely-accepted for engineers to branch out into different lines of work. Here are some of the more popular options.
Data Science and Analytics
In an increasingly data-driven world, engineers with strong analytical skills and a knack for working with numerical models fit well in this line of work. Data science and analytics roles involve analysing data sets, generating data models, and interpreting them to drive business decisions.
However, you won’t just be a number cruncher, either. Part of your role will be to take data and use it to tell stories. The key is to translate your analysis from something that only a technically-minded professional like an engineer might understand into a message fit for a wider audience. This can be very fulfilling if you enjoy seeing quantitative analysis transformed into actionable solutions – something that’s core to the engineering skillset!
Technical Sales and Marketing
Engineering graduates often possess excellent technical knowledge or an ability to grasp key technical concepts. These attributes are invaluable for technical sales and marketing roles. Working in technical sales, your job is to promote a company’s technical products or services to a client base. This could be anything from industrial machinery, software, automation solutions, or waste management and recovery services.
In a technical sales role, you will liaise with both business decision-makers and key technical staff on the client side to sell your company’s offerings. You’ll get to leverage your technical knowledge by discussing implementation details with other engineers and learning about how their systems and processes work. Being on the client frontlines also means you’ll constantly be exposed to the latest market developments in your chosen industry as well!
Project Management
The ability to plan, execute, and monitor complex projects is a valuable skill set. As a project manager, you can work in various industries, ranging from construction, manufacturing, IT, business services or healthcare. You’ll oversee projects from inception to completion – making sure things are being done on time, that funding and resources for the project are secured and incoming, and that issues delaying the project are resolved as soon as possible.
As an engineering graduate, you’ll be trained in breaking down a complex structure or process into its component pieces and troubleshooting each one individually. This is a valuable trait to have in a project management role. Your duties will also involve figuring out how to do something and then creating a repeatable process so others in the organisation can do it too. That certainly sounds a lot like engineering too, doesn’t it?
Supply Chain Management
Supply chain management is all about ensuring the constant movement of a company’s goods and resources. This could be raw materials needed for production, or finished products headed to market.
You will be making use of your engineering training in systems and process management to accomplish this, building a system in perpetual motion that’s moving commodities from place to place, or even continent to continent. You may also be tasked with building and implementing data models to forecast resource demand.
This can be a very fulfilling line of work if you’re the kind of person who enjoys maximising efficiency in processes or creating systems where output and speed are timed just right. You may also have ample opportunities for international and global exposure in this line of work, since supply chains around the globe are all interconnected.
Management Consulting
Yet another line of work focused on identifying and resolving problems, management consulting is about advising client organisations on how to improve their business processes, resolve strategic concerns, and maximise their profitability.
This is a very broad line of work, with a wide range of employers. You could be working for a big external consulting firm focusing on general business issues ranging from a new market launch, improving profit margins, to overseeing mergers and acquisitions. Or you might work with a smaller specialised firm focusing on niche areas such as implementing sustainable business practices or supply chains.
As an engineering graduate, you will use skills like data analysis, statistical modelling, and solution-oriented thinking to help clients generate creative solutions to problems. This is a line of work that famously pays very well once you climb the ranks. You will also be exposed to companies and professionals in numerous industries, which will help you build a very robust professional network.
Financial Analysis and Trading
Financial analysts and traders work for investment banks, hedge funds, insurance firms, and other financial institutions that deal with securities or commodities markets. They buy or sell investment instruments and financial products in order to generate a profitable return for their company/client.
You need to be able to think systematically in this line of work. A big part of trading is understanding how sectors across the global economy can influence each another and affect the prices of different investment assets. Your analytical training in engineering will be a huge asset here, as well as your ability to dissect systems and anticipate outcomes.
If you have programming skills, you will be in especially high demand. Modern trading involves the heavy use of algorithms, which must be constantly updated and tweaked in order to stay ahead of the market. Being able to compile and generate statistical models to feed the algorithms is a key skill too.
This is a line of work with notoriously long hours and a brutally fast pace. However, the financial rewards and commissions from each profitable trade can be very generous to match.
