My experience in automotive is that yes, CAE is a bit of a dead end, because the people who specialise in it enjoy it and don't want to do anything else. Admittedly we did non linear things like crash and MBD. One upside, apart from being technically challenging, is less corporate B/S. So far as promotions go, if your company has a technical stream for promotion in parallel to management, you might get on that ladder. I never did, as I don't write papers etc, and retired as the highest paid senior engineer in the company.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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You need to decide if you want technical challenges or management promotions.
If the former, stay in analysis and become an expert, and pick up side skills in materials, design and manufacturing to support analysis expertise.
If the latter, switch to project “engineering” and numb your brain with tracking endless project schedules and statuses. But it will be hard to switch back after a while.

I truly enjoyed Project Engineering when at our company it was primarily leading a design team and managing the overall technical design. Years later, when it moved into tracking schedules and statuses, I liked it a lot less. I chose to stay in the technical world where I still enjoy what I do and I work to the schedules tracked by management. I don't know if like Greg Locock I am the most highly paid senior engineer, but if not, I am close to the top and that is fine with me.

forget considering how other people value you ... that way the dark side lies.

Become invested in your career or not, find the work/life balance that suits you, that you can live with.

Understand what "enough" money is. More is unnecessary.

Know yourself. Do you want to solve technical problems or do you prefer working with people, getting people to work together and achieve "great" things.
There are a very few people who can do both (not who think they can do both). These people are identified very early on. I knew one, never worked with her, but 1 year out of school she was a team lead in BAe. Next job, maybe 5 years in she's a VP. Then later she got pi$$ed with the BS, and went and did something that was meaningful to her. People who worked for her liked it (imagine that !).

"Hoffen wir mal, dass alles gut geht !"
General Paulus, Nov 1942, outside Stalingrad after the launch of Operation Uranus.

SE4...

Some of what You are asking about is personality driven... what do you have a passion to-do and the skill-set to do 'that' better-and-better-over-time; and how 'good' are You at leading-managing-guiding-teaching teams of people with various disciplines/backgrounds/personalities.

Essential skills as an engineer have to be learned thru experience, so that You have deep understanding-of, and appreciation for, 'the work'. AND ALSO, we-all have to learn 'how to work-well with others' to accomplish common team objectives.

As a leader-manager You will have-to... MUST!!!... finely hone your 'people-skills' to greater depth/breadth than many nerd-engineers are comfortable with.

People warning....

Engineering is easy. People are hard.” –WKTaylor
Engineering is easy. People are nearly impossible.” --variation

Regards, Wil Taylor
o Trust - But Verify!
o For those who believe, no proof is required; for those who cannot believe, no proof is possible. [variation, Stuart Chase]
o Unfortunately, in science what You 'believe' is irrelevant. ["Orion", HBA forum]
o Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand everything." -Anton Chekhov

Like others have said, it's up to you. Personally, I've been able to straddle the line somewhat, doing both the research, analytical and development tasks, as well as occasionally being the project manager (but mostly for R+D activities). To do that required moving away from larger corporate entities and into smaller ones, and startups, which means less direct compensation and more risk (I've worked for (pausing to count) 7 different firms over the years).

Quote:

and those who stick around in analysis for too long end up getting stuck at a mid-senior level engineer with limited promotion potential.

I think you are possibly misinterpreting the data. Is analysis a cause or a symptom? Clearly, someone who designs well and can analyze should be highly prized, but someone who can only analyze is going to be stuck. I can't see how someone who designs, but doesn't analyze is going to get places, since they kind of go together.

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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Thanks for the replies everyone. I'm curious for those of you who seem to have spent a lot of their career in the highly technical roles -- rb1957, WKTaylor, and GregLockock and SWComposites (since I see your names around the forums often) -- did your positions involve design and analysis (to IRstuff's point), or were you guys focused in one area? I'm currently only a mid-level engineering with about 7 years of experience in analysis (not design), but how other people value your function is directly related to growth in any company. In my company it seems that analysis is treated as a "starting point" or entry-level position before moving into design, where there are many Staff and Principal level engineers (compared with zero in analysis only). It also seems like a lot of the staff/principal engineers have a strong understanding of analysis, although they aren't really doing it anymore, they're just involved as far as it supports their design engineering work. Does this seem typical in the industry as far as you guys have observed?

Interestingly, it seems to me that some of the aerospace primes like Boeing highly value their analysis functions, and that it might be closer to the top of the technical food chain than what I'm observing at my place of work.

Thanks again in advance,
~Robert

We've attritted all of our purely analysis engineers, since most of our senior engineers all can do analysis, as needed. The issue is that analysis is a relative small, but important, part of the overall design process, so having people who only do analysis winds up under-utilizing those people if they can't fill a design role. Moreover, analysis is not a single thing, so the inability to do, say, thermal analysis vs. modal analysis is another limitation.

As for Boeing, what you think you see may be an artifact of particular organizations within the company that are so massive that specialization works out for them. Other organizations, since as the one I was in, was too small for that kind of specialization. The bottom line is whether your role can always be occupied doing useful things; if not, then you become a burden on the organization if you can't fill some other role when there are no analysis tasks to be had. When we became a separate company, we flirted with having full-time analysts a few times, but they eventually were either let go or left of their own accord, due to insufficient work in their specialty, which is kind of the other side of the coin. Being a full-time analyst makes you the SME, but also requires you to be the SME by spending enough time doing analysis to truly be the expert, not to mention not getting bored. Our best ME does it all, design, kinematics, thermal, vibration, presents well and communicates well.

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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if by "design" you mean "driving a CAD terminal", then no I don't do design.

if by "design" you mean advising Design on what to do, coming up with ways to solve design problem (and liaison problems), then yes ... after many years of doing pretty stricitly analysis you develop an opinion about solving problems, and a solution that'll also certainly work for you (as only one cog in the great wheel of design). Personally I like to give the designer a couple ideas and say pick one, since again after much experience you can think about what the other parts of the design will want.

Here's a truism (from many years of experience) ... everyone (ok, 99.99%) will pick a solution that minimizes their work and someone else's cost ...
the designer (the CAD monkey) will choose a solution that is easy to CAD,
the stress analysis will pick a solution where the stress is easy (or easier) to analyze, he may optimise the design for inspectability,
the production planner has his own things to prioritise,
as the production worker, inspection, maintenance, etc

2nd truism ... all design is compromise and often in aerospace you can optimize a decision, you make one (based on your experience) and find out years in the future (usually, sometimes not so long) if it was a good decision.

"Hoffen wir mal, dass alles gut geht !"
General Paulus, Nov 1942, outside Stalingrad after the launch of Operation Uranus.

We haven't had CAD monkeys in a long time; the engineers do it all, requirements flow down, conceptual, CAD, analysis, rinse & repeat.

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 Entire Forum list http://www.eng-tips.com/forumlist.cfm

I worked for a very large company and we had a design group (more of a project engineer role, but the design engineer is very influential) ,CAD, Test, and Vehicle Engineering. The latter consisted of several different departments which were basically a mix of development engineers (more hands on) and CAE/analysts, who may or may not get their hands dirty. I've done both the latter jobs and a mix. The ultimate goal was to eliminate as many prototypes as possible, so IRStuff's experience of bored analysts never came up, we were always trying to find better analysis methods and improve our predictive ability.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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I started in a stress analysis job, though in an R&D group, at Boeing. Initially did a lot of FE modelling and stress analysis, but also some material and structural testing, software coding, and some conceptual design. As an analyst, one needs a good understanding of the material property inputs, as well as ability to guide the design into proper load paths and acceptable strength and stiffness. And often there is a need to correlate large scale test results (and the inevitable “surprises” with the analysis. I eventually transitioned onto aircraft programs, and in addition to the above had to get involved with manufacturing processes to support production, as well as to understand the effects of those processes on the design and structural capability. Have done some preliminary design work (sketches), but I refused to learn any CAD systems (had enough headaches with FE codes).

As mentioned above, roles in large companies then to be more specialized, while in small companies an engineer has to do a lot of different roles/tasks. But every company is different.

Also, some product lines and their companies require a lot of analysis, and in those their are better career paths for analysts; other products require only minimal analysis and in those companies the career path is not there.

Currently there are a lot of open stress analyst jobs, so consider looking around. There is no whatsoever company loyalty to employees anymore, so its best to try to move when times are good.

"There is no whatsoever company loyalty to employees anymore, so its best to try to move when times are good."

In Aero, there hasn't been loyalty since the '70s, when Boeing laid off so many people that a billboard went up.

https://www.historylink.org/file/1287

in fact, it's better to be a contractor ... they're let go before staff, so can find the "best" next jobs.

"Hoffen wir mal, dass alles gut geht !"
General Paulus, Nov 1942, outside Stalingrad after the launch of Operation Uranus.

This isn't a CAE-specific issue, smaller depts simply aren't going to have much opportunity for promotion so moving up likely will require jumping to another role, another dept, or even another company. My advice is to embrace change, job-hop every five'ish years, and develop a wide variety of knowledge/skills/abilities bc that's what employers value. Be the engineer that can handle every task and challenge, not someone who has to constantly call a niche for support. Also, put a grain of salt in everything older generations suggest bc times/industries change as do the skills necessary for success. CAD-operators and CAE-generalists might've once been common but disappeared with pensions. Even ten-year corporate employees are getting rare as companies are finding more-expensive, external-hiring worthwhile.