Career advice

[todd2ny]

I have a question as it relates to structural engineering. I am a PE with some structural expierience. I am now in a field which requires some structural design which is outside my area of expertise. Therefore, I am having to learn new things quickly as the design schedules are tight. I am considering my career options. If I did not want to do design anymore, what would be some other career paths I could take?

Thanks in advance for the advice,

 

[bimr]

If you want to stay in the engineering field and do not want to design, the natural career path would be to go into project management type of position. You probably would have to do this with a larger firm, since the work at smaller firms is design/manage, rather than strictly project management work.

 

[abusementpark]

How can he manage a project if certain design questions are, like he says, outside of his expertise?

 

[bimr]

A man's got to know his limitations.

Since when is a project manager a technical specialist?

 

[firai]

As an engineering manager, I believe that you should have a fairly good understanding of the technical expertise involved in the actual design performed by the people under you, since you need to be able to foresee and prevent problems with the design that's happening on your team, even though you may not be doing it yourself.

If you are not feeling comfortable designing in the new field you are in, I would suggest that you consider moving back to the previous field you were in. It appears that your career options require more learning before you can be fully proficient in them.

 

[msucog]

find a firm that can help you take advantage of your expertise or as others mention, move to a pm position where you're dealing more with the day to day stuff and less of design. if you're a "people person", you might even be able to find a marketing position but in a crunched market, the marketing folks may be the first to get the pink slip. you might consider a materials testing firm since they often have many different avenues that one can take within the firm. in our firm, none of us strictly do design. we all have projects (construction or geotechnical) to manage. we perform calculations on everything from deep foundations to retaining walls to geophysical work. some of our people do nothing more than manage our field personnel and oversee special inspections. and we even have people that are responsible for overseeing our labs.

with a structural (and civil?) background, you might be able to transition to a special inspections kind of person where you basically manage and are the point of contact for the special inspections performed within a company.

however, with any job, i doubt you will ever stop learning. but maybe you can find something that allows you to progress at a more reasonable/comfortable rate in a field that you can enjoy more.