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Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned
2

Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

(OP)
Hi,

So what I'm really looking for here is some advice with respect to the increased future career progression/job prospects that an MEng can offer vs. jumping on the career ladder now if I was given the opportunity.

Background: Currently completing a year in industry post 3rd year studies [ie. I could graduate with a BEng now] with the original intention to return to University and complete my MEng this September. I have previously contemplated taking a job if the opportunity arose due to the worry in this economic climate with getting a graduate job. The thought has now come even more to the foreground due to recent talks of MEng sponsorship and even more recently the prospect of a job if I was stay on at this job and stop at a BEng. For info, the company is a Fortune 500 company [UK Site], great career prospects etc

There are obviously two big sides to this decision mainly centring around going for a job now with high probability of getting it [good relationship with management, company knowledge etc] vs by not having the masters will this play a negative effect on future employability. I might add, completing the MEng was always my plan but it's hard to not think twice when a potential job offer is on the cards and the whole 'you should take opportunities' presented to you comments. It's a difficult decision which has the potential to create regrets whichever way I go.

I was hoping to hear a few peoples thoughts and comments which may prompt further considerations.

Thanks and sorry for the long post.

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

If you're that close to an MEng, do it. It's much harder to go back and do it later. Your company should be willing to wait a few months for you to complete your advanced degree. Discuss it with them. If they give you a take-it-or-leave-it proposition in terms of your employment, in my mind, that says a lot about the company. I wouldn't want to work for a company that would force me to forego a degree that I was less than 6 months from earning to work for them.

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

Yes, if your MEng will be complete by September - get it done, ask the company nicely if they can delay your start date until then.

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

(OP)
Hi Steellion,

I think I am swaying more towards continuing as originally planned and completing my MEng. As my Father keeps saying, it may easily be something you regret in later life and an extra year studying will become negligible in my life long term.

I might not have described myself clearly in the OP, what I meant was I would be returning to complete my MEng in September and hence would be graduating July 2015. I don't have any issues with the company at all as they would already be willing to sponsor me through my MEng [which is as close to a future job offer that they can make]. I think it might be unrealistic to expect the company to guarantee a job on completion but again I do not have much experience on whether this kind of situation occurs or not. My manager has already made it clear that there is not pressure to take up the position as he is aware of my plan to do the MEng.

The company has a very active part time Msc programme at the local univeristy which would be the alternative if I were to take the job although my manager has highlighted that one question HR would pose would be to ask why I would give up the MEng to just do a part time MSc through work.

I think the more I write about this the more my mind is being made up about does getting the MEng done and dusted.

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

Advise completeing your MEng. Inform your potential employer of your intent and ask if you can be considered for part time employment, followed by full time employment after graduating.

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

miketurbo - many responders will be US based and not familiar with the difference in the UK education system so be prepared for some misunderstandings.

You don't mention what field of industry etc. which may impact how useful a MEng V BEng will be. If you eventually want to get chartered (kind of like PE for US folks) then I believe you may eventually need the Masters one way or another though it's a while since I looked at such things. Also my crystal ball is on the fritz which makes it difficult to be sure what will really happen in the course of your career.winky smile

Honestly it looks like both options are pretty good, sponsored for an MEng but without necessarily a job offer or Job offer with sponsored part time MSc. Based on the info available I'm not sure there's much to choose between the 2 options.

Will the course of study of the MSc be as good as for the MEng or vice versa? If through the employer the MSc may be more focused on what you'll actually need - or at least what the company thinks you will need. This of course can be good or bad, good if you get to make a career at your current employer (or at least the same field) potentially a little less good if eventually you want to break into a different field that the MEng would touch on.

As to HR's question the honest answer is probably 'a bird in the hand...' but that may not pass their psych test. You could say something about how to be a better engineer you feel you need bot education and experience and this is way to bet getting both simultaneously or some such.

What's the employment market like for graduates with your degree in the UK? What % of grads are walking into engineering jobs V being stuck working in some insurance office or similar?

Sorry, probably not much help but there you have it.

Posting guidelines FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm? (probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

Ultimately, it's your decision to make, and yours alone, and, hopefully, you're not going to be taking the advice of some anonymous stranger on the web.

Clearly, there are things you can do to make the decision more rational:
> List out pros/cons and weight them with some scoring that corresponds to your current needs and desires
> Perform a worst-case analysis and look at consequences of various possible failures and weight by probability and severity, i.e., you take the job, but get laid off, or don't get to continue your education through the company, or you take the MEng route, but the company goes away or finds someone else, or something happens to you.

These are basic ways of approaching engineering design decisions, so, if nothing else, you've tested the waters on doing engineering tradeoff analyses.

TTFN
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Need help writing a question or understanding a reply? forum1529: Translation Assistance for Engineers

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

Do the sponsored MEng. It is a fantastic opportunity that very few people get. Even if the sponsoring company doesn't offer you a job in the end you will have had the benefit of the industrial contact during the MEng, which will make you a much more credible interviewee than the typical postgraduate perpetual student. I can only imagine they would not hold a position for you if some organisational calamity occurs, in which case no ones job is safe anyway.

Here's the IMechE's requirements, looks like that MEng is a good move

The UK Standard for Professional Engineering Competence (UK-SPEC) has standardised the academic requirements for CEng and IEng registration:

CEng:

Accredited BEng (Hons) degree plus appropriate Masters degree or
Accredited BEng (Hons) degree plus approved Further Learning to Masters level or
Accredited MEng


Cheers

Greg Locock


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RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

Three year BEng? Hmm... Seems short. Regardless, the MEng is what I would do in your situation.

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

Agree with Greg's post above, he just beat me to it. Getting your chartership is the real goal if you're UK based. That opens doors which neither B. Eng or M. Eng will open. The M.Eng is a simpler route, and quicker.

CELinOttawa,

Three years full time, or four years including a placement year. A course at a reputable university will be pretty intense for those three years.

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

The standard for a B.Eng. in Canada is four years full time, which often becomes five or six years if a student fails even one course. Even with that there is discussion of making a Master's mandatory for licensure as a P.Eng. Two years is normally a Technician's diploma, sometimes a Technologist (though these are typically three year full time). I've tutored at the college level - The materials are the same, just much less in depth.

My schedule for each of my years was packed, with hardly an hour off per day from 8am to 4pm. Homework was stated to be a standard "hour and a half for every hour of lecturing". Thirty hours of lectures a week was standard. We worked around the clock to make it, with 70% of candidates failing to complete the program.

If that sounds bad to you, know this: My father's generation went to University Monday to Saturday, with some labs scheduled for Saturday evening if more time was needed for lecturing on a subject. One in five graduated.

I'm not meaning to be difficult about it, but I really don't think three years is sufficient training for a Civil Engineer. I don't know enough about other types and so won't comment... But I think I have a better idea why so many foreign engineers have a hard time getting licensed in Canada.

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

Oh, and before someone stomps all over me for being a Uni snob, know this: If I had my choice, all graduates would require four years under a senior Draftsman before being able to get licensed.

And I very much like the fact that you can still get your P.Eng. by challenge exams in Canada. You simply write the exams to prove that you have all the required knowledge and abilities to be a professional engineer... I don't care how you came upon those skills, just that you have them.

But there is no way a graduate of a three year full time program has the same skill set as what a graduate of a four year full time program does.

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

I guess it comes down to whether the skill set is worthwhile to the employers or not. A four-year course with 50% filler material has less technical content than a three-year course with 10% filler material. You can make your own mind up what constitutes 'filler'. My own course had very little, because the timetable was jammed full of technical material. We had one valueless hour per week of 'management' in year two, which I typically spent in the library doing 'proper work', and that was about it.

I've worked with engineers from pretty much every industrialised nation and the best-educated engineers I have worked with have come from Poland and Russia. I know virtually nothing about their education systems, but I suspect it is 'old school' with very heavy theoretical and mathematical focus and virtually no 'filler'. I have met only a few Western-educated engineers with similar levels of ability in mathematics and physics, and they learned their craft many years ago 'when the exams were difficult'. Ha-ha. smile


RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

Agreed, and you can add Czech engineers to that list. I've had Russian staff and you're bang on... The education is math and science focussed in the extreme and competition based with set cull rates. I had a hard time imagining the described program as much less than torture. Termed "Specialists" rather than Engineers (which was seen as inaccurate and capatilist), the Soviet degree was six years and I suppose meant your regular Russian engineer had an education beyond the western Master's level and below PhD. I have no clue what their programme would be like now. One of the Russian's I've had pointed out that the system was a product of tyheir unique economy - so bad with equipment so scarce that they learnt and perfected the theory behind some things even when a practical demonstration would have been better... Demonstrations use resources, of course.

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

CELinOttawa the OP is in the UK, the education system in the UK is different than in the US & apparently Canada.

In the UK a BEng is generally achieved in 3 years.

An MEng is generally achieved in 4 years (that's 4 years from 'high school' - just one extra year than for BEng).

The reasons for the compressed time frame can be (& has been) debated elsewhere if you insist but is off topic for this thread.

Posting guidelines FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm? (probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

Interesting... I did look, and did not find, but you're entirely correct: This is off topic for this thread.

My apologies to all, most particularly the OP.

Re the OP: Any chance a final decision has been reached?

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

(OP)
Hello,

Sorry for the lack of response over the weekend. Thanks for everyone's input, particularly GregLocock and ScottyUK for your posts which have further highlighted the importance of these considerations.

After a lot of thought over the weekend I have come to the decision that I will continue with my MEng in September. I believe that this will drastically improve my employability not only with the company discussed but with alternative and future employers. From hearing others peoples experiences, completing the MEng full time over a year seems a lot more of an attractive options to me personally rather than completing it part time while in full time work - that's just my opinion. The other influencing factor of course has been the ability to progress towards chartership in a much more straightforward fashion.

Hopefully, on completion of my MEng the company will be hiring as strongly as they have been this year - the industry appears to be performing well so this shouldn't be an issue, although you can never be sure.

Apologies for the confusion surrounding the location of my university, I did mention that I was working at a UK site but overlooked that this may not have been interpreted correctly.

Thanks again for your comments.

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

I was not aware that UK registration requirments were moving to a Master's level as a minimum. When I graaduated in 1970 (after a 4 year gruelling course), a batchelors Hons degree was the requirement (plus the appropriate experience).

The two best chemical engineers I worked for had little academic training. Both now long dead, they grew up around the second world war, and both had an amazing uderstanding of units ops and how they dovetailed into an industrial setting.
They could pull all sorts of experience based rules of thumb etc. out of a hat, and were right every time. Not a computer in sight, just the back of an old envelope or fag packet.

I dont know if the move to higher academic requirements is a good thing, or if it just represents the dumbing down of courses. Can anyone explain the thinking please?

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

There are so many interacting factors at work!

The universities have become much more driven by numbers in the last couple of decades, with increased student roll equating to more cash and the then-government's barking mad idea that everyone should go to university. Somewhere universities changed from being machines for educating people to machines for making money.

No one wants to attend a poor university, so the university pass rates go up to ensure the place remains attractive to new prospects. Universities dropped many of the 'old' subjects like, for example, electrical machines because they are resource-intensive and relatively unpopular because they are perceived as difficult. By eliminating laboratories and workshops they can squeeze another few hundred kids in for class-based learning while reducing the overheads. The kids coming out of the far end of this system have better grades and know far less than their forebears.

Perhaps the professional bodies initially tried to maintain some credibility with industry, so they raised the academic requirements to a Master's degree to compensate for the weakening quality of a Bachelor's degree. But the numbers game is also being played by the professional bodies, so they are handing out charterships - with the attendant higher fees that they attract - to people who would have had little or no chance 20 years ago. In the case of the former IEE - the dreadful IET - they couldn't agree to a merger among equals with their counterparts in the Civil, Mechanical and Chemical disciplines, so they engineered a merger with the technicians' professional body, doing neither group any favours but increasing the membership revenue and reducing their overheads. They also broke the link between membership - MIEE - and chartership - C.Eng - which had existed for many, many years. I suspect this too was a revenue-generating exercise.

I am not proud of the current professional registration system in the UK. The IET is a convenient means of registration with the Engineering Council, but nothing more. Its predecessor was something that gave me a little bit of pride through being a member, but no longer.

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

That seems to be different from the US. While the costs are exorbitant, the education still seems pretty reasonable, so long as you pick a decent major. Admittedly, there is some of the cash flow aspect, since the UCs in California are heavily recruiting foreign and out of state students because they have pay close to double the in-state rate.

TTFN
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Need help writing a question or understanding a reply? forum1529: Translation Assistance for Engineers

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

(OP)
Longinthetooth... a Masters is not compulsory to obtain chartership; it is my understanding that while you are able to use your Masters to demonstrate postgraduate learning as a prerequisite for chartership, without it this has to be demonstrated off your own back on the job.

From my experience [University of Leeds - Russell group UK] I don't feel the course has been dumbed down at all. We do in fact have a lot of practical lab time planned into our timetables including wind tunnels, engine beds, mechatronics etc the only difference I can see is the emphasis on computer labs which now probably outweighs other types of labs.

I kind help but find it patronising to consistently hear of people having a knock at the current generation of young adults trying to make an education for themselves and how it was so much worse 'back in the day'

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

miketurbo,

I wasn't intending to have a go at today's graduates, it was intended as criticism of the system. The young people are a product of the system, and the problem lies with the system. Many of the guys who are retiring, or have retired recently, have forgotten more than I know about electrical machines. They were educated by a better system than I was, and they benefitted from that. I see recent grads - from some top-flight universities - who know less than I did when I graduated from a less prestigious university. Every year the standard drops a little further. It wasn't 'worse' back in the day, it was better. Just harder too.

Without demeaning your course or your achievement in finishing it in any way, I don't think you've been graduated long enough to realise just how much stuff you will never fully understand. It tends to hit you mid-career, once you've been through a few employers and have engaged with a few of the real experts, just how much you don't know.

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

Well said Scotty.

I dont critisise today's grads either. Like most other people, I got a good gounding in my field, but that's all it was, a grounding. You carry on learning throughout your career. I am still learning to this day, although I am a lot nearer the end of my career than the beginning.

It is just my personal opinion, but I dont see an extra year spent doing a masters contributes anything towards your development as a practicing (i.e. non academic) engineer. This opinion obviously does not hold sway in the corridors of power. So be it.

One area in which I have a great deal of sympathy with todays grads is that they have to amass considerable debt to get their education, whereas I got mine virtualy free. I think the fees nowadays are criminal.

Mike C

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

(OP)
I absolutely haven't being working long enough to appreciate what you have mentioned Scotty and only time will tell. However, this would assume I was not proactive in my own learning and development and instead expect to be spoonfed. Maybe it is more to do with attitudes to learning within society that have contributed to a lower grade of graduate rather than the courses? I'm not sure.

Longinthetooth - the way in which the masters contributes to IMechE accreditation is through the academic side; hence why I mentioned that if a Masters was not persuade you can still become accredited but then on onus falls on you to demonstrate appropriate levels of postgraduate education & learning. As I previously mentioned, I personally would prefer to do this within a postgraduate establishment.

I missed out on the recent increase to £9000/year fees and while this is a lot of money It wouldn't have dissuade me from following the same path as I have done - perhaps it will help to reduce the ridiculously high levels of attendance at universities though.

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

Mike -

One thing you will discover is that the workplace has changed a lot since the old days of nationalised industry. There are few electrical engineers (as distinct from electronic engineers) today who will get a chance to specialise to the extent that their forebears did prior to the 1980s. The reason why many of today's experts are perceived as 'experts' is that they specialised in a fairly narrow field during much of their career. The way companies are structured today means that they prefer to employ a relatively small number of engineers who know a reasonable amount about a wide range of subjects and who can handle the majority of problems, rather than having a few more staff with individual specialisms who between them can deal with pretty much anything. When they need an expert they hire them in as consultants. This business model works until the experts are no longer available because they retire, and grow old, and die. That point is being reached around about now, but big business hasn't quite woken up to this unwelcome news. The sad fact is that British industry has allowed a vast amount of knowledge to seep away in the last thirty years without it being passed on to the next generation, and it is now virtually impossible to repair the situation because of the passage of time means that the skills and knowledge are no longer present in the labour market.

On a more positive note engineering is a great field to work in, and wages are rising as companies steal each other's staff to fill the gaps opening up due to retirement. Today's graduates have far better employment prospects than those of 20 years ago because of the skills shortage, and that is nice to see.

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

Scotty,

You are right about the shortage. I work in a small office in the north of England. We are part of a multinational engineering contractor. Much of our work is sourced localy and we could take on a lot more if we could get the people to do it. Lots of good new grads around, but we can only train up a small number at ony one time. The experienced people just are not there.
Good job security for me, but a sad comment on the industry, just as you say.

Mike C

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

but how are the salaries? competitive with germany for example?

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

Competative from which perspective - employer or employee?

RE: Possible Job offer at end of year in industry vs returning to complete MEng as originally planned

I dont know how my company compares to Germany, Certainly we are comparable to all our surrounding area. London rates just boggle the mind, but take away the cost of housing, long expensive commutes etc. and they are probably no better off.
Of course the weather is better down there, which is something.

I have to visit our head office in london, now and again. Recently they rejigged it to get more people in (from another building which they closed). It's like working in a call centre. Long rows of desks with no room sand no privacy at all.
I'll never complain obout our office here again. (Of course, all the managers kept their individual offices!)

Mike C

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