(ThyBlackMan.com) There’s no doubt that the world of work is daunting. With so many avenues for you to explore throughout your career – and so many skills to gain – it can be difficult to know exactly which line of work you should pursue. In this short guide, you’re going to learn why engineering can suit a wide variety of minds and motivations, providing for the wallet as much as it does for the mind. Read on to discover some of the key benefits of a career in engineering, and how you can build your journey in this vocational field.
Wide Skill Base
Unlike jobs that require you to specialize early on in your career – like accountancy and law – your career in engineering will keep plenty of doors open for you while developing a wide array of your innate skills. Engineering encompasses such a wide range of skills and knowledge, in fact, that it’s difficult to recommend just one or two school subjects that you need to have excelled in for your career to truly take off in engineering. These jobs require you to:
- Have good analytical skills, using data to drive your decisions
- Maintain good communication, both written and spoken, with colleagues and partners
- Excel in the world of numbers, figures, equations, and mathematics
- Be able to find solutions to problems, looking to external help where applicable
If you’re not confident that you have all of these skills, you can be sure that they’ll be drilled into you by the time you’re climbing up that first rung on the engineering ladder. If you ever choose to make a career move to something completely different, you’ll take with you a wealth of knowledge that you can apply in other jobs in the future.
Training and Education
Related to the skills and knowledge that you require as an engineer are the training and education that you’ll go through in order to qualify as a top-level worker in your field. These courses – whether in junior colleges or in universities – will enable you to develop all the skills listed above and more, allowing you to be truly confident in your role as an engineer. You can also study a course in Engineering Management in order to build up your people skills and seniority in your business. To do well on an engineering course, be sure to:
- Take detailed notes about everything that you learn
- Review your work each week in order to understand what you’ve learned
- Be in touch with your tutors and senior academics for extra help and guidance
- Find some industry experience, like working on a construction site
- Develop your social skills while studying, as these are vital for any engineering career
The schooling you receive at the hands of specialists, professors, and tutors will result in a well-rounded personal profile that will make you highly employable – and, ultimately, set you on course for jobs in high wage brackets.
Wage and Benefits
A job as an engineer is typically regarded as one that will earn you a high salary, with a generous retirement package, and other career benefits besides. All of these benefits mean that a life spent as an engineer is one which you can expect to be comfortable, and with high status, in your local area. But there are plenty of other benefits to being an engineer, and they include:
- The ability to travel, both from project to project, or company to company
- To lead the development of industry-changing and world-changing technologies
- To collaborate with private sector and public sector bodies, making contacts as you do so
- To contribute positively to your local area, your state, and your country
- To rise to become an industry leader and respected individual in the field of engineering
All of these benefits should serve to attract ambitious and career-focused individuals from across the social spectrum to become engineers.
Your Projects
While the majority of your working life will be spent working on the projects of other people, as you gain seniority in your organization, you can expect to be able to devise your own projects – from conception to execution. Nothing can be more satisfying, in this later stage in your career, than guiding your team to create and execute your desired engineering project on a large scale. To reach this stage in your career, you’ll need to have:
- Attainted at least one degree in engineering and in engineering management
- Be able to work closely with people from different sectors and disciplines
- Understand the work that goes into projects on both a large and a small scale
- Work comfortably with budgets and deadlines throughout your career
- Be able to show your portfolio of personal work to those around you
Working on your own projects is also something you’ll be able to pursue with a passion when it comes to your own home and your own land. Many engineers turn their hand to home design and redevelopment in the latter stages of their career – creating the perfect retirement spot as they do so.
Ethical Engineering
Throughout history, engineering has largely been an ethical endeavor. When roads, bridges, tunnels, and other infrastructural projects have been completed, individuals in those localities have prospered. Whole communities have been raised out of poverty as a result of smart and timely engineering projects.
In the modern era, the ethical side of engineering is as important as ever; only this time, you’ll be focused on those projects that are best for the environment, causing as little damage to nature as possible in your mission to create excellent infrastructure, homes, hospitals, and schools. For an engineer with a social conscience, these projects can bring a great deal of meaning to your career, leaving you happy after each long day in the office. With the world looking increasingly to engineers focused specifically on green technology and infrastructure, this is a growing and lucrative field to move into at this moment in time.
There you have it: some of the key pieces of advice for budding engineers and a shortlist of the benefits you can expect from your career in engineering.
Staff Writer; Larry Ross