Is MBA in the Oil&Gas or Energy-Thermal Processing Sector worth? 5

[VSEnergy]

Hi All, I am a fairly new grad currently working with a well reputed EPC (Engineering Procurement & Construction) company in the Oil&Gas sector in Calgary, Canada as a Mechanical EIT (Engineer in Training). I wanted to know the collective wisdom of the following career paths, from the experts who have done this before.

1. Is an MBA worth the time, money, and effort to eventually move up the ladder in the Energy and Processing industries? It seems that Engineers with field operations experience rather than an MBA are the ones who climb to the exec level of decision making roles in the EPC and Client side. Is Masters in Project Management even worth considering?

2. Is a general mechanical engineering Masters in Engineering (M.Eng, not M.Sc) worth considering in these sectors, to move up in ones career? It seems that most M.Eng degrees may be just degree mills which force you to take course which many not have much practical relevance to the particular industry, because of the intensive focus on theory. It seems that unless you are working with an OEM (Original equipment Manufactured), an engineer may not require the same level of detailed technical knowledge if you are working of EPC and Client side. Plus, I am not interested in R&D type career advancement.

3. My ultimate goal is to start a business in the energy or process industry, or to be in an exec position to make significant change/impact in the industry and to implement the latest R&D at a systems level. I feel that for this I will need the finance and marketing background an MBA provides, and the operational experience working on site provides. However, the need for M.Eng is not clear.

Please impart some wisdom, on which experience path I should take to accomplish my goals. Should I first get some site experience, and then get M.Eng, followed by a MBA? In the short term should I try to be a specialist in static or rotating equipment, or try to move into PE (Project Engineering/Management) or Project Controls route? I understand there will be/is a shortage of qualified technical people in North America soon; I would like to be prepared for this as well.


Awaiting all your thoughts. Thank you.

 

[cranky108]

If you are wanting to go the the dark side of management (there are also other dark sides).

Some of us prefer to stay on the pure technology side of things

 

[SWComposites]

Have you asked these questions of your current management? If not, why not? If so, what advice did they give you?

Have you read all of the other threads on this forum about the "worth" of an MBA?

 

[patprimmer]

People on this forum may have a different attitude to MBAs than do people selecting others for senior management positions

Regards
Pat
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[VSEnergy]

Hi All,

Although I have read many posts on eng-tips, this was my first time posting here, or any forum for that matter.

cranky108- I do not consider management as the dark side. As you need good technical people, you also need good managers to identify and develop these gifted techs. As we all know, not all technical people can be good mangers and vise versa. I do not want to climb up the ladder to play boss. Rather, I feel that you only get a better overall picture of a project/industry, if you are at such a high level; perhaps one may also be able to influence change within the industry.

SWComposites- Yes, I have asked these questions to many of my immediate managers, and whom ever I come across in the field. Some agree that MBA is a useful tool in general to move up. However, I have also spoken to many others, who had no use from his/her MBA. I do not want to do an MBA just to put it at the end of my name. I would like use it to achieve my ultimate goal.

patprimmer- Thank you for your advice or the bias that may exist. I did realize this was more of a technical form and that many people may not look fondly upon an MBA, but I wanted to hear all sides of the story before I make a decision.

Many thanks to all who have responded so far; hope to hear from other vantage points as well.

 

[FeX32]

Bah MBA.
Where's SNORGY?


Fe (IronX32)

 

[patprimmer]

Fe.

SNORGY is one I had in mind when I commented.

Regards
Pat
See FAQ731-376 for tips on use of eng-tips by professional engineers &

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for site rules

 

[FeX32]

He'll turn up sooner or later.


Fe (IronX32)

 

[patprimmer]

I'm sure he swill and no prospective MBA will go unpunished.

Regards
Pat
See FAQ731-376 for tips on use of eng-tips by professional engineers &

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for site rules

 

[zdas04]

If you'll look closely at the resumes of the VP's and above of mid-siza and larger Oil companies you'll see that virtually all of them either have traditional MBA's or Executive MBA's. I'm not sure exactly what it takes to get an Executive MBA, but they are all from top schools and were earned after the individual was marked for high places (I think it is something like two months on campus with 10 hours of lecture and 12 hours of homework a day). I don't think that the people who stayed in school after their undergraduate work and got an MBA have fared very well in the workplace, but getting an MBA mid-career seems to be required.

Looking at the same population I see it pretty rare for engineers to have a technical masters (earth-sciences guys all have technical masters and many have technical PhD, but not engineers). I don't think my MSME hurt my career, but it did seem to shift it pretty solidly away from a management path.

Starting a business or moving into top management in an Oil Company are absolutely divergent paths. For example, if you want to start an engineering consulting business, professional qualifications are more important than academic qualifications (i.e., in the U.S. you pretty much have to have a P.E. to start an engineering consultancy, the PEng is probably just as crucial in Canada). Starting an Oil Company demands hands-on experience in Land, Prospect identification, and drilling. Too much education seems to be a major drawback in that arena.

Starting out a career, you should take advantage of all the opportunities you can get your hands on. Try to get assignments that interface with clients (these all require non-trivial amounts of travel) to build your personal network. Establish a reputation as someone who goes the extra mile without complaining. Take on crappy jobs as an opportunity to try to turn them into successes. Starting out, your attitude will define who you become. I found that a drive to be in the front of the room helped me get the kind of jobs that put you in front of some pretty cool rooms because that drive seems to be in short supply (most of the people I worked with in a big company preferred not to do presentations).

David

David

 

[SNORGY]

WELL

My "MBA-DAR" led me here...

Umm...well...

But for the fact that the typical requirement for an MBA in EPC is for a perfectly good engineer to have a Massive Brain Anyeurism, there is not a lot to be found fault with in your aspirations. And in Calgary, no less? I suppose one has to admire your courage for even *mentioning* MBA and ENGINEER in the same paragraph in *that* (this) town.

With an MBA, you Might Be Adept in business, but at the same time, Might Be Atrocious in engineering. Or perhaps it is I who Might Be Apprehensive about it.

Ribbing aside...

I have seen one guy pull it off, and I have tremendous respect for him. A very intelligent man and one of the best clients I ever had. I think the thing that made (makes) him special is that he doesn't let his MBA get in the way of his P.Eng., and he has learned that both functions are worthy of great respect when performed correctly. While my personal experience with MBAs leading engineering companies has not been positive, I have boiled it down to one observation. Which is...

When an engineer wants to start a business and run his or her own company, he or she listens very carefully to all of the advice given to him by business-focused people, such as MBAs; however, when an MBA wants to run an engineering company, he or she generally either trivializes, dismisses or simply never listens to anything the engineers have to say.

Therein lies the problem.

My advice to you is, if you want to lead engineers, then listen to them and pay close attention to every aspect of their work that creates trouble for them. You can't help solve anything that you don't understand in the first place. That's what a lot of MBAs fail to grasp.

Get the engineers on your side and you will be able to achieve a lot of good things.


Regards,

SNORGY.

 

[TheTick]

Worse than the MBA is the incubation process before the disease sets in full. MBA study is almost a disease in itself. Most people I have seen working on MBAs become useless in their current positions. They don't finish their work assignments, they don't return calls, they are quick to shove half-@$$ed work on to their peers.

Hurry up, finish your MBA, move on and make room for someone useful to take your old position.

 

[FeX32]

move on and make room for someone useful to take your old position.

Well said. MBA engineers are not "technical" anymore, rendering them useless for engineering related tasks.


Fe (IronX32)

 

[miningman]

Snorgy missed the most relevant comment. Mediocre But Arrogant

 

[SNORGY]

I was simply being Merciful But Accurate.

Regards,

SNORGY.

 

[bigTomHanks]

Before you go waste all that money on a nice shinny MBA I strongly suggest that you take a job as an operations supervisor/manager first. This is where you will learn what management is really about and then if you decide if you want or need to join the club then do it. I personally think that the difficult aspect of management can't be taught in a classroom and a lot of people don't realize this until after they spend tens of thousands on a gimmicky degree.

Just ask yourself these questions:
Do I want to work longer hours for the same or a little more pay?
Can I stay calm when people challenge my authority or decision making?
Do you like public speaking and having to answer tough questions on the spot?
Are you ok with caring about everyone's problem when nobody care about yours?

Remember though that everything bottle necks at the top and everyone has a boss to answer to. My preference is to stay technical, sleep in my own bed, eat diner with my family, and live a longer less stressful life. I've seen so many high risers fizzle out because they aren't related to an executives family or for other reasons that have nothing to do with how well they perform relative to their peers in management.

 

[VSEnergy]

Thanks to zdas04 (David), Snorgy, and bigTomHanks for your helpful replies:

David, your point is what concerns me the most, I would like to get my MBA out of the way when I am young, but the consensus seem that a MBA is only useful ones you prove your personality is suited for a management or supervisory post at the least. Also, and MBA is only useful if you can apply what you learned immediately, to solidify the concepts, just like other subjects.
I will definitely get my P.Eng. However it seems that HANDS ON (site) experience in the energy and processing industry trumps any technical master degree in mechanical engineering, unless you are R&D type roles. Am I correct?

If I chose to do M. Eng should it focus on something specific like materials, electro-mechanics (for to understand instrumentation), or just a general degree would be sufficient?
What type of assignments will give me the most exposure EARLY exposure to clients in a meaningful way to accomplish my goals? So should my short term goal be just to get on site? Should I also seek Project Controls type of experience to advance as potential management candidate?

Snorgy: you seem to indicate that MBA is not a very popular choice with EPCs and the Operators for the Energy/Processing Sector, I am correct? So will it become a hurdle with such biases in the industry, rather than help me during early career? Is Masters in Project Managment worth considering for early career prep for managment instead of M.Eng or MBA?

bigTomHanks: Your suggestion to take on an operations supervisor/manager role before I jump ahead to an MBA is very wise. This should allow me to gauge how well I can handle people, as I typically steer away from office politics. As I have never been in a leadership role before, what are some ways I can slowly get my feet wet, to see if I can full such a demanding role of middle management, who is caught between two sides?

My major concern is that I do not want to be a small cog in a big corporate machine. I would like to be a technical specialist, but the thought of a particular skill going out of style with technology seems to be dreading me. Secondly, being purely technical and not paying attention to the financial side of the overall business also irritates me.

Lastly I want to state that MBA in itself cannot make a good engineer a bad one, nor a competent engineer into an incompetent one. These individuals were as such to begin with; MBA is obviously just a tool. A tool is only as good as the craftsmen who wield it! If one studies finance or engineering by oneself from books, nobody (clients) would acknowledge your competence in making a technical or business decision.

Hope to see more opinions

 

[SNORGY]

VSEnergy,

You are the unfortunate recipient of the general disdain that I feel towards MBAs who figure they know more about engineering than the guys and gals who actually hold the credentials. There is only one appropriate word for those types of MBAs, and that word is "idiot".

If I read between the lines, you present as one who wants to advance and be successful while the technical side of engineering is secondary to you. It is as if you are smart enough for you and an interesting pastime, but not what drives you. You appear to define success in terms of being a "mover and shaker, Captain of industry" type instead of being a mere engineer or a mere applied scientist. There is nothing wrong with that, the world has a place for everyone.

In your case, I think mabe the more appropriate context and weighting of your question would be to ask whether or not an engineering degree would be advantageous to you in your business career. I think you are looking at MBAs, Masters Degrees and P.Eng.s as titles and credentials that you can accumulate towards being able to climb the ladder of success faster. There is nothing wrong with that, but if it reflects reality then not only should you pursue an MBA but you should seek a business outside of engineering. Engineering will only continue to disappoint and irritate you.

I think you are driven by something, but it isn't a passion for engineering, necessarily. Like I said, nothing wrong with that.

Regards,

SNORGY.

 

[zdas04]

"Getting my MBA out of the way ..." is a very telling statement. It is as though you were accumulating merit badge in Boy Scouts. Not a good way to run a life. I took several MBA courses as an undergraduate (the story is too involved for this discussion) and found them all to be "when you are the decision maker, you will ..." kind of discussions. By "decision maker" they meant corporate executive (i.e., someone with attorney-in-fact responsibilities). That is why so many of the actual corporate executives have MBA's from an Executive MBA program--they had reached that point in their careers and took a couple of months between assignments to learn the next package of stuff. Getting an MBA and then going to a drafting table (or entry level engineering position) is a major waste of effort.

Relevant engineering experience trumps just about everything. An engineer who has built a bridge (or a wellsite or a gathering system) will get preferential consideration for the next bridge-building project over someone who has just read about building bridges and has his head full of academic theories about how a bridge should be built.

Getting an MS without relevant engineering experience is often a very bad idea. MSME folks who have never built that bridge often bridle at coming into an entry-level training program even though they probably need it more than the BSME guys (who are a tiny bit closer to their senior design project which is too often the closest they've ever come to a practical engineering problem). The MSME guys often want more money to do the same job as a BSME. Without relevant experience it just doesn't happen that way.

Once you get a few years of relevant experience, then an MS can be a career booster (but not a huge one in this industry). No one but you will ever care what you specialized in. They may ask what your theses was in, but they won't really care. If you go that route pick an area you are interested in. I did fluid mechanics. I learned some stuff that has been useful in my everyday career, but I have a bizarre everyday career. Materials would also have been useful. Same with Controls. My passion has always been heat transfer and fluid mechanics, so I went that way.

Assignments that get exposure? The hard ones. The ones that safe guys run from. If you find yourself a small cog on a big project look for a way to make your cog shiny. If you get an assignment to (say) size the relief valves on a vessel, dig into the process and come up with the definitive list of credible scenarios for that process (instead of just grabbing a list that someone else developed for a "similar" process). If you get an assignment to write a gas pipeline model, put in the elevations and evaluate the liquid hold-up for slug-sizing (an important task that is rarely done well). Finally, do this cog-shining for about the same number of hours as the normal phone-it-in method charges (usually that will take some off the books effort, but there really isn't any other way to get to the boardroom if that is your goal).

David

 

[FeX32]

David,
So you don't consider an thesis project to be as good "practical" engineering as an undergrad degree project?
I don't mean to argue, I am just curious. From where I come from an MScEng thesis project encompasses all that a degree project does does and much more.
Of course you could say that some research projects don't even conduct experiments etc.., but what about the ones that do etc.


Fe (IronX32)