Your age will right now work for you.
You will be competing with your classmates for jobs. While they are an unknown quantity in the workplace you have a track record and references for something other than your paper route.
After a couple of years most people will forget that you only have a couple years experience and see a thirty something and expect them to have about the same experience as the normal mid thirty person i.e. 10 years or so, you had better be able to get the moist out of your early experience.
You will also reach the workplace with some work street smarts that the new graduates will generally be lacking, you will know how to act and react to the dynamics of the workplace far better than they will be able to do so. This will be a dangerous time since you will not have the engineering experience to live up to the expectations of those around you.
After around 10 years experience (and I’d credit you with a couple of years worth of experience for this discussion due to your past presence in the work place) recent experience matters more than age. If you are ready to move to a senior engineer position, then you will be a senior engineer in your early 40’s and your classmates will not be ready until at least their mid thirties.
The only way that your age will count against you now is if you are after a job where mobility or a large degree of physical effort is necessary., In your thirties you may be starting a family, own a house or other property and not be able to travel or relocate as easily as a 22 year old with only one suitcase and furniture suitable to be returned to Goodwill.
The danger of your age is that you will not have enough time to make a career mistake. A 22 year old can afford to spend a couple years on a dead end career path and still have enough working time left to recover; you on the other have already had your time on the dead end career path.
Don’t listen to the naysayer about engineering being a dead profession. There will always be enough work available for an engineer to keep a roof over his head and food on the table. It may be ground chuck in a small house instead of sirloin in a mansion but you will always be able to make enough to survive.
Pick an area that is resistant to outsourcing. Any job where the work product can be done and shipped or transmitted electronically can be outsourced. This includes all manufacturing and a lot of design positions.
Operation and maintenance positions in an electrical utility is one area of work in the electrical field that can never be outsourced for example.
Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng
Construction Project Management
From conception to completion
