Career Change / Career Direction Change 2

[lahoria80]

Hello everyone,

I joined this group today with the hope that I could get a professional opinion from fellow engineers on a question which is baffling me from last few months and I am not getting any where with it.

Question background:
I am Chemical Engineer with Masters degree. I live in Australia. I have been working in Water Treatment Industry for last 6 years as a Process Engineer. However, I donot find my job intellectually challenging. Therefore, I am looking at various options and scenario what could be interesting or where I could see myself working for rest of my life.
Two of the area which I have in my mind are:
1) Computational Fluid Dynamics
2) Process Engineer doing design using simulation softwares
I have studied some computational fluid dynamics packages during Masters and have not used them since then. Simulation softwares like Hysys etc... I have never used them.
I have tried getting in to above two areas but all the companies require experience. As I have been working in Water industry. I donot have relevant experience.
Now the questions are:

Questions:
1) Is it too late to change the career considering that I only had 6 years of experience after my education?
2) My understanding is: there are two ways to get in to above areas, do another degree or do short courses on relevant software packages? But would that solve the issue of not having relevant experience? There is time and cost involved in either way and I want to make sure that I get this right. Also, global financial uncertainity making puzzling me as well and I have to ask myself a question. Is this the right time to take such risk or invest time & money?

What are your suggestions, ideas? Please serious and helpful comments.

Thanks,
Lahoria80

 

[Jboggs]

I cannot answer for the specifics of your question because I am in a completely different field, but I can tell you this: at only 6 years into your career you have only just begun. It is not too late at all. In fact you have plenty of time to completely change your career several times if you wanted to. In my 30+ years I have worked for large and small manufacturers, large and small consulting firms, insurance companies, and many others. Worked for family owned businesses, large public corporations, small businesses, and myself. I've done product design, facility design, production equipment design, system integration, project management, departmental management, failure analysis, program development, ... I could go on and on. The point is this: follow your heart, your passion. You do not want to look back on your life with regret.

 

[kirrer]

Being a CFD analyst or a simulation engineer requires operating software, true - but it's the base analysis & fundamentals of the software which are most important. I'm also not in those fields, but I've looked into it myself and it seems that the jobs are open to the engineers which have both experience (even if student experience) as well as a fundamental understanding of the software & the underlying equations which are being solved. You could get this from another degree, but a course on a software package alone will probably not dig deep enough into the fundamentals to give you that solid foundation upon which your computer simulations are based.

Another option is to find relevant university courses, find out what book they use & follow the curriculum in the book. If you've convinced yourself that you've learned all you need to know, then start toying around with the software packages again - whether open source or student licenses, if you can obtain them. In this case, having your own projects & the fundamental background may be enough to prove to someone that you can handle an entry level job; at that point, it's up to you to take it further. What I've described here is the lowest-cost, easiest option which can be done while simultaneously working - in fact, I'm doing so right now. Best of luck to you.