How frequent is it for someone to leave the engineering profession 8

[MechanicsGUY]

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.

 

[IRstuff]

"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. "

Just what's your basis for this? The US obviously does not provide any military aid to China.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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[KENAT]

I think the point is a lot of Phd candidate researchers in STEM at US universities are from China.

Based on our recent recruits gendna2 may not be wrong but I haven't researched the data.

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[IRstuff]

See my citations above; the STEM shortage is a complete MYTH. Trying to train more engineers simply lowers starting salaries below what people in the this and other threads are already moaning about and increases competition in an already saturated market. What the Chinese do is almost irrelevant in this regard, given that they're going to be in the same boat relatively soon. People looking for off-shore manufacturing have been looking towards Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc.; even some are looking to move manufacturing back to the US.

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[KENAT]

You're talking a slightly different topic IRstuff.

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[IRstuff]

I was just pointing out that the assertion about poor professors is irrelevant, since there's really not a shortage of engineers, so the poorly taught students are irrelevant and unlikely to get good jobs. Training higher numbers of qualified engineers is just going to be bad for the engineering job market.

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I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[ProEpro]

Look at this another way. How many people are there in you engineering department with 10,20 or more years of experience? How many people do you know that retired as engineers? A few many have moved into engineering management and stayed there. Many that were successful at that moved to higher levels outside of engineering.

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.

 

[HamburgerHelper]

I won't be convinced we are graduating too many until offshoring and visa abuse stops.

 

[SteelSlugged]

People get bored with what they are doing and they leave. We put too much emphasis on finding a job 'that you love' that I believe empowers people to believe everyone else is doing what they love and, since they don't love what they do, then they must be in the wrong field. That's their right, but it's a false reality. A lot of people will never love any work they ever do. A lot of people make more money in other fields outside of engineering. Period. I sometimes love what I do, but I'd rather do what I am doing than risk being unhappy in another field making more money that I do now. I would also rather make the money I make now than be 'happier' in another field. It might change one day, but for now, that's my balance.

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.

 

[HamburgerHelper]

Steelslugged,

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.

 

[weldstan]

I know of numerous EPC firms which have offshore engineering offices and as a result have lowered their engineering staff in the USA.

 

[FeX32]

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...

 

[awhicker84]

FeX32:

"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."

 

[IRstuff]

"Pharmacy, $100k+ & paid hourly"

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)
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[awhicker84]

My dad and step mom are pharmacists. I would never do that profession. I agree with you.

However, the poster was asking for other jobs that paid well without getting into management (happiness aside). That one is an easy example.

 

[moltenmetal]

Optometrists are similar deal- high pay, low stress. But BOTH frequently run businesses and therefore manage employees, budgets etc. Yes, you can be an associate and act as an employee in those professions, but the money isn't nearly as good that way...

 

[Panther140]

People with engineering degrees leave the field, but engineers can't leave the field. Those are not mutually inclusive characteristics, either. Wherever engineers go, they will engineer the things.

"Formal education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin

 

[Maui]

Engineering isn't for everyone. I could not wholeheartedly encourage someone to pursue an engineering degree at this point unless they had a clear-cut aptitude for the discipline and felt that it is what they really wanted to do. I would be more inclined to steer them toward a career where they would have better job security, decent income, and hopefully lower levels of stress. Medicine or teaching would be good examples of this.

Maui