How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
(OP)
Some main questions are:
When/if does an engineer choose to leave his/her profession?
Is it common to leave the profession?
Is engineering a profession in which one wishes to ultimately leave?
What experience do you have with colleagues (or yourself) leaving of the field? Do you know individuals who've left
Engineering?
Do you plan to leave the engineering profession one day (for better paying jobs in the financial/medical/legal fields)?
More details:
I work in aerospace and I was shocked when a close colleague of mine left his post to pursue medicine (at 34!). And I was more shocked to learn he was planning on leaving to profession many years ago (he took the required exams two years ago, and has been talking to one of the supervisors about this for ~5 years). He was excited and thrilled to finally leave the field. I suppose engineers have the background and talent to pursue greener pastures so I guess I cannot blame him. Also my brother left engineering to pursue law after about 3 years working in chemical engineering.
This changed my view of the field and I contacted a few old friends I went to college with. I found out they ALL left the engineering field. Mostly they moved into the finance and/or management roles of their current organization, but they were retired from engineering.





RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
Then again, there's the routine of being that trained problem solver in the larger corporate structure. Many times (majority?) it becomes a rut with little hope of advancement or escape. I heard it described once: a good, effective Engineer is just too useful to allow to go into management or other fields within the company.
TygerDawg
Blue Technik LLC
Virtuoso Robotics Engineering
www.bluetechnik.com
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:
The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
In general, changing careers is probably quite rare; you invest a huge time investment to get good, but changing careers means you start over, mostly from scratch.
I once had an opthamologist who supposedly started as an engineer.
Your question about money is more about you than a profession. Jumping careers in the hope of making more money is generally absurd. You presumably make your best potential salary at the thing you do best. Jumping to a new career absurdly assumes that you will be better at it that those that are already there; you might be better, but it's unlikely.
Your colleague presumably was burned-out or realized that they weren't getting the satisfaction that they wanted from their career. You assumed that your friends from college were meant to be engineers simply because they switched careers. Children are often badgered into choosing majors that they really had no interest in to start with, but were too timid to stand their ground against their parents. That's a huge time waster, if that were the case. I knew I wanted to be an engineer since I was about 14, and stood my ground against my parents (mostly my dad) wanting me to be a doctor, or something else. While I'm not in the discipline I majored in, I'm still an engineer, and still loving it. If you can't say any of that. then perhaps engineering was never really going to be your thing. There's also a lot of pressure on students to major in STEM, but it's no good if you can't get a decent job or you're not suited to it.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
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RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
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This is normally the space where people post something insightful.
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
Have a look at this report:
https://www.ospe.on.ca/public/documents/advocacy/2...
The chart on p. 6 indicates that per PEO surveys of 4th year engineering students, only about 8% know already in 4th year that they plan to leave the profession for something else.
See the table on p. 8: only about 31% of engineering grads per the last Canadian census, work as engineers. Engineering has the lowest match rate, by far, between education and working in that particular profession, of all the regulated professions. Also interesting on that page is the graph showing how that fraction has changed over time- it's been getting steadily lower over the past 25 years.
See the chart on p.12: a slightly higher fraction of engineering grads with 0-10 yrs of experience are employed as engineers than the average of all experience levels, but it's still only around 35%. So clearly, if 92% of 4th year engineers want to work as engineers, and only 35% are in the profession after 0-10 yrs, most are failing to gain entry to the profession after graduation. The trouble with taking that lateral step right after graduation is pretty simple: an engineering education is seen by employers to have a relatively short shelf life. Few will choose to employ an engineering grad who spent their first five years outside the profession.
Most troubling on that chart on p. 12 is the fraction of engineering grads working in jobs that don't require a university degree of any kind: that fraction is about the same as the fraction working as engineers...
As to people leaving mid-career: I've seen a few, but have no data to offer on that, only anecdotes. Some make lateral steps to pursue a new interest, or because they realized too far into their engineering degree that they wanted to do something else. Others do so in search of a higher reward to risk ratio than engineering offers, frequently entering into undifferentiated "business" or "management". Frankly, with the median teacher's salary in Ontario equal to the median level D (10+ yrs experience) engineer's salary, the motivation to take that lateral step isn't that hard to understand.
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
A lot of my contemporaries make use of company funded MBAs to change career paths. A lot of them moved into banking from there.
Many at mid-career go into real estate after they start a family to have more control over their own time
One of my colleagues just came back into engineering as a product manager after exploring over a decade as an entrepreneur - they needed someone with people skills with a technical background
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
A friend of mine who is the most brilliant engineer I know was trying to start up a 3d printing company, which he gave up on after five years. He now works contract while trying to figure out what his next business will be. The odd part of this is that he is extremely technical but none of his past business ideas or ones he is currently mulling over are very technical at all. He enjoys the autonomy of having your own company more than the high tech stuff he might get involved with at a large company.
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
- one who left early in his career who left to pursue a childhood dream in military aviation, which turned out to need some skills he had in smaller measure than he thought ("the other left please")
- one who left mid career to become a contracts specialist, now returning because he sees engineering as offering more potential for getting to the top of the greasy pole
and I think both are likely to do quite well.
A.
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
One fine day Howie announced that he was leaving the company, to help build a lobsterboat, and then to crew on the lobsterboat.
I didn't understand his decision then. I do now.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
As someone said on here, only about 50% of engineers do technical work, i.e. design work. I'll venture to guess that also includes the engineers who actively supervise the designers.
The other 50% are managers or paper pushers of one sort or another. Whether they manage a manufacturing process, manage construction, manage government organizations that do research, construction, acquisition of technical items, etc... These are roles that require an engineering degree, and for good reason, but involve little "real engineering".
I have never met anyone who completely left engineering, i.e. went into a purely financial job, or decided to go into medicine, or went to the military in a non-engineer coded billet. Effectively speaking, I have met hordes of engineers who got the degree, did not like real engineering, and decided to leverage that degree as much as possible.
Especially when it comes to a really broad degree, like mechanical engineering, this seems to happen much more often.
At the end of the day, you need everyone on a team to make things happen. You need the hyperspecialized technical engineer, the upper manager of the requisitioning organization, and everyone else in between.
Ironically, or maybe not...unless you are a renown "hyper-specialist" or at the top echelon of your design firm...you will probably make the most money if you go down the management track and have great leadership abilities...which are intangible, but whose results are real and hard to duplicate. Just go to any name brand American university and you will see hundreds of number crunchers in the making, including a large amount of foreigners...but you wouldn't want to hire half these folks for more than just number crunching...and even there you may have some "personality" issues.
Of course, most of of this does not apply to computer science...one of the last remaining fields where the "number cruncher" at a top company can break 100K after a year of work. That whole field will eventually implode...but that's another matter and another opinion.
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
Previous surveys show that few engineering graduates are actually employed as engineers. Now, there are obvious arguments about "definitions," etc., but see:
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/...
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-cris...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-ste...
As I mentioned earlier, there may be non-educational factors at work, but there are also actual educational factors that I've observed, which is that many schools or students are woefully bad, but manage to get the Cs that get the degrees. Certainly, companies are generally more interested in hiring the A and B students, so where do the C students go? Anecdotally, I've seen that at the high school level; some schools proudly boast of 60+% passing rates (3 or higher out of 5) on AP tests, but that kind of sucks compared to a school where 90% getting 5s is a bad year. The latter would be a college prep "factory" that cookie stamps everyone into highly competitive college applicants, but the same analogy holds, i.e., compare UC Berkeley School of Engineering vs. any other school not in the top 200 schools. I had an applicant who I asked to figure out the threshold of a TTL gate; they were unable, but I showed them how they should have done it. At the end of the day, 5 of us got together and it turned out that 3 of us asked the EXACT same question, AND provided them the same answer, so even though they got the answer twice, they still couldn't answer the question. The kicker is that this individual supposedly had a 4.0 GPA from a school who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty. That person was barely qualified to be a technician, and we rejected them, much to the consternation of our sister division that attempted to foist them on us.
So, I think that there are a LARGE number of ill-prepared BS engineering graduates who probably shouldn't have been (ill-prepared or BS engineering). My school used to at least weed out wanna-be physicists in Physics 1, and my room mate, who was one of those, wound up in EngLit.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies forum1529: Translation Assistance for Engineers
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
In response to IR Stuff and the threshold of a TTL gate; here is some food for thought when hiring engineers and just engineering education in the US.
1. I have no idea what a TTL gate is, but I'm civil, haha.
2. Engineering education sucks. Period, end of story. It's awful...you could not get worse teachers if you tried. These so called "professors" are just hyper specialized, hyper intelligent, research bots spitting out papers that nobody reads, and nobody uses...except that they percolate into my building codes and make them more complicated. This country hit its peak of infrastructure development in the 30s-50s without any of their research, without SE licenses required for more and more structures, without all this computer software, without 200+ page buildings codes, without, without, without... They wore suits, didn't know how to program computers, knew how to communicate, were practical, and come to think of it, we had a real economy, but that's another tangent...
These "professors" are awful, God-awful at teaching. Oh, and the mathematics and pure science professors are worse. Oh, and the foreign professors who are becoming more prevalent, are even worse. The ones from Eastern Europe usually set new lows...Chinese professors are not good, but also don't care so much about punishing the "stupid" American students.
The "smart" morons in charge of engineering education constantly push more and more crap into the curriculum; meaning that Johny has been bombarded with so much knowledge that he can't do anything well. I know people who still cannot execute a perfect shear and bending moment diagram but are taking pie in the sky theoretical mechanics courses.
3. The only places where engineering education might not suck, are at small engineering schools, i.e. Rose Hulman type places, or maybe a place like West Point. The only difference between Berkeley and Southern Kentucky University (I made that up, don't get offended, Kentucky is a highly developed state with great schools and an economy more dynamic than California's) is that Berkeley students have a higher IQ due to higher entrance standards, and are punished with more work and stress. The education might be better in Kentucky, the difference in pedagogy is certainly minimal and not worth any real salary premium. It's just that the Berkeley product should take more stress and working hours before he/she mentally breaks down.
4. Bottom line; hire based on attitude, references, and appearance. If Johny can figure out the TTL gate threshold, but lives like a slob, is anti-social, can't communicate, acts like a gnome, or maybe just comes off as a know it all a-hole...I'd rather take the dumber kid. The dumber kid is still trainable and will probably not get bored with the work and remain loyal to the company. It doesn't mean there aren't those candidates who have it all, and maybe a TTL gate threshold is a really basic aerospace concept, but just remember, the common denominator for most engineers is a really, really, really poor education.
Finally, my high school teachers, paid half as much as these professors, and putting up with way more b.s., were head, shoulders, hills, and mountains above these so called "professors". I'd fire half of them tomorrow and just tell them to go build themselves a research institute where they can syphon money from the DoD and DoE and NSC in order to research their useless b.s. and then hire folks with real world experience, BS and MS degrees, and have them teach us the basics.
Angry, you bet I am. You would be too when paying 10K+ a semester for a garbage product, not to mention living expenses. That's life...right...
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
University is what you make of it:
For example, if a professor rapidly clicks through powerpoints every lecture, then you need to take the initiative to read your textbook on your own time, work out practice problems, and go to office hours. If you can learn the theory in your fundamental courses, then you should be able to apply those fundamental principles to real world engineering problems. In addition to this, internships are a great way to supplement your classroom theory with real engineering. (During my undergrad I had plenty of time to take 4 to 5 courses per semester, have an internship (15 to 20 hours per week), study, and drink.)
The whole "you need to attend a Top X School (let x=10 or 20 or 50) if you want to get anywhere in life" is extremely annoying to me, but it is prevalent in many (all?) fields: medicine, law, engineering, business, etc. If I went to a top 11 school and was interviewing against a candidate that went to a top 3 school, I want to believe that the schools would not even come into consideration. But if they did, I wouldn't want to work for a person that puts faith in school rating systems.
Now to try to segway at least a little bit back to the original topic...
There are a lot of topics that I learned in University that I have never directly used in my professional career:
- Derivatives
- Integrals
- Eigen Values
- Principle of Virtual Work
- Rutherford–Bohr model
- Slope Deflection Method
- Simple Harmonic Motion
- Atomic Packing Factor
- Conjugate Beam Method
- Kinematics
- I have also never had to solve the notorious "beam with a hinge" (the beam that is statically determinant, but would be indeterminate if it weren't for the hinge)
- etc
(side note: I think it would be fun to have a thread to see how long we can make a list like this. Granted everybody's list will be different, but maybe we could find a few topics that are consistent across the board)Even with all of these unused topics, I do not feel that school was a waste of time. In my opinion, I see many young engineers that are turned-off that the daily grind of an engineering office is not like academia. They want to use the theories and techniques that they spent the last 4 years learning. I don't blame them, I would love to have a job that more fully encompassed my engineering curriculum. I personally take joy every time I remember a simple theory or equation and am able to use it to solve a seemingly more complex problem.
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
My gripe is that nothing seems to improve over time and it is undoubtedly getting worse. The sustainability fad, soft science in the engineering curriculum coupled with extremely difficult courses, awful teachers, pointless research, and of course, astronomical tuition rates.
We can easily, easily, do better than this.
Instead of making engineers that are "brilliant at the basics" we are making engineers that can't do a thing exceptionally well. Not only that, but they come out with no ability to use the software in their particular fields either.
We have professional societies that hem and haw about STEM, and promoting STEM, and then you get to college and these courses are awful, the classes are overcrowded, we're educating more foreigners than American students...I mean, wtf!
It's such a weird society we live in too. On one side of the street you might have a neighborhood where the students will never even touch basic calculus and struggle with y=mx+b...and on the other, some professor is teaching things that 0.00001% of the population can fathom.
I'll leave the topic with this picture. The land grant colleges were set up to teach mechanical, agricultural, and military science. You look at those men who led these schools from the 1860s to the 1920-1930s...and my gut tells me they would be appalled at where their institutions are now.
P.S. I meant NSF, not NSC in my earlier post. Funny how American tax payer dollars, often via a military pipeline, are funding the PhDs of hundreds of Chinese students while our own DoD is head over heels into the antagonistic South China Sea rhetoric. Funny how these schools, with very liberal administrators, have no problem taking the military's money, while simultaneously lambasting a strong DoD. When will we collectively pull our heads out of our buts and get our business straight?
Ok, enough ranting. Feel free to flame me...delete my post, haha...if it's got too much complainin' and too much negativity. Let me also say that I have nothing against foreign students either, honestly. My Chinese comments are just there to show how our country's policies are illogical and incongruous.
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
Just what's your basis for this? The US obviously does not provide any military aid to China.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies forum1529: Translation Assistance for Engineers
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
Based on our recent recruits gendna2 may not be wrong but I haven't researched the data.
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies forum1529: Translation Assistance for Engineers
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies forum1529: Translation Assistance for Engineers
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
I looked at my classmates from college on linkedin. After about 15 years more than half were no longer engineers. Honestly during the past 20 years in the US it has been hard to stay an engineer. Each year there are fewer engineering jobs. We will see if anything changes with the rumored improving economy.
There maybe industries that value experience more. I work in product design.
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
Hamburger, I'm not sure if I follow what you are saying. Graduating more engineers creates more demand for the job so they can pay less. Visas will do the same. Offshoring is unrelated to the number of engineers we have. Offshoring is related to fewer environmental regulations, nonexistent unions, and little to no rights for workers which translates to bigger profits when manufacturing overseas. Maybe if you look at the result of offshoring-fewer manufacturing engineering related jobs for US engineers means more engineers in the work place competing for the same position which further drives down wages.
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
There are too many engineers in the U.S. or there are too few engineering jobs due to offshoring. The result is the same for either case.
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
"Happiness and job satisfaction aside; I never understand precisely why everyone always thinks they can make money elsewhere. Where else can you easily make six figures even if you are not in management? And in some entrepreneurial companies if you do go the mgmt route your income is tied to your dept. profit and can skyrocket..."
One example: Pharmacy, $100k+ & paid hourly
SteelSlugged,
I hate to think of holding someone back from trying to find something they may like a little more. Maybe the risk is too high for you (maybe for me too), but you shouldn't say it isn't possible. Doing what you love doesn't mean loving every minute of it, it means doing something that you enjoy overall. Over lunch I had something ran through a big sander (woodworking). The guy that runs that woodshop isn't always in a great mood. He has stress too. Overall though? I'd say owning his own woodshop is probably a bit more fulfilling than dealing with my stress in order to ship another compressor. Who knows.
Or can you imagine working a field that directly made people better off? I volunteered at a non profit law firm the other day that specialized in freeing wrongly convicted felons.
My sister (nurse) gets notes from patients telling her how great of job she did.
I get: "Thanks for doing a good job on project XYZ. You're late on ABC though."
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
Sure, if that's what floats your boat. It's not exactly a job that'll exercise your engineering brain power.
While there are certainly engineers that came into the profession for other than the engineering itself, in which case it doesn't much matter if they did something else; for others, doing a pharm job just isn't going to hack it, regardless of how much it pays.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
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RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
However, the poster was asking for other jobs that paid well without getting into management (happiness aside). That one is an easy example.
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
"Formal education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin
RE: How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession
Maui