MSc - generalist or specialist?

[AX3L]

Hi!
I'm soon about to choose my area of higher education and I'm kind of struggling to choose between the more general "production engineer" or the more specific "control system engineer" line. Even "automotive engineering" is an option, and if anything that seems even more general than "production engineer".
As I see it, being a specialist in such a theoretical area as control system engineering has the advantage of me not been so easy to replace by someone who has worked their way up in a company and it seems easy to get a job even abroad since there's no doubt about what you can. Almost everyone who has done a few years in a business has learned a bit of everything whether he/she wanted it or not but most people don't become good control system engineers by them selves. On the other hand, as a generalist it seems that one can work with product development one year and sales/manufacturing of cars the other and if I after my degree finds out designing cruse controllers isn't as fun as I thought in school I'm more stuck with that since it's really the only thing I'm good at.

I know engineering is a pretty wide profession anyway and I probably can work with pretty much the same whatever I choose if I like to and really work for it, but some inputs from you experienced engineers would be deeply appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Axel

 

[IRstuff]

Are you talking BS or AS? As I see it, a combination of breadth and depth is ideal. Controls, particularly as it branches into Kalman filtering and estimation, will be in high demand. As computers and components have gotten cheaper, more and more things become controllable, resulting in expanded markets for items that previously were unimaginable to the average consumer. Consider the pan/tilt platform and camera stabilization. Once relegated into the stratospheric heights of hundreds of thousands of dollars for an empty gimbal, you can buy the components on AliExpress or eBay for less than $100 and put together a low-end system that could be used for many applications

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[kingnero]

The main advantage of engineers is that they can be placed about anywhere (broad basic knowledge), and that they (should) have enough skills to become a "specialist" in whatever area they set their minds to.

Ofcourse, I do not mean lawyer/legal things and such, but anywhere in engineering disciplines. Whether it is automotive aerodynamics or spaceshuttle fuel systems or race bicycle hydraulics. you get the point.

 

[moltenmetal]

The controls engineers I know for the most part have excellent employability but poor employment retention. They often get hired for a job with XXX controls software/hardware and then dumped at the end of the job. Not universally true, but definitely true of the ones I know who don't work for a particular software/hardware vendor/distributor. That's in the chemical/process industry rather than automotive.

Don't marry yourself to any industry. Build transferrable skills regardless whether you try to stay a generalist or build specialist skills in one particular sub-discipline.

 

[AX3L]

Thanks all three for your answers!

IRstuff: I'm not sure what BS and AS stands for, if BS is Bachelors degree that's the one I soon have finished. You're right about the best is being both a specialist and a generalist but unfortunately that's hard to achieve in school. My question is therefore more like, shall I be a "specialist" in school and let the school of life teach me the other stuff or shall I be a generalist in school and specialize in an area where I will work later? The point you make about being a specialist in control system is very valid though, it really is a technology of the future I think! There's a lot of examples of products that we have been able to be make for the public using these really powerful and cheap microchips, and besides that there's a lot of control system in a modern car and it will be more wither it's powered by some liquid fuel or electricity. Not to mention the manufacturing industry. For us EU/US countries/country to be able to compete with the cheap man power of Asia, India and soon Africa automation is the only way and that's like the definition of control system engineering.

The thing is though (kind of like moltenmetal is saying) that maybe a tech specialist becomes more of a managed employee than a project manager and that it's hard to move up in the career path once you've started at the drawing-board. On the other hand I don't want to spend two more years at college just to find out that I have get the same skills that I would have gotten if I had worked for say three years after my BSc (with no more loans and a decent paycheck while doing it). Going that way isn't an option though.

 

[IRstuff]

Not all companies are like mine, but there are a raft of companies where technical careers to not necessarily end up in a dead end. And if you are not necessarily that interested in management, then assuming that you are going into management seems to be counterintuitive and counterproductive; you'd almost be better off finding a company that can maintain decent pay without sacrificing what you went to school for.

As for higher degree expertise, there is no doubt that a sufficiently disciplined person could probably learn as much on their own and on the job as they might have learned in school. But, school does force you into a fixed schedule to complete such education. In my case, there are tons of things that I could or should learn, but I don't necessarily find the time and inclination to carry those through.

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[AX3L]

Well I'm not sure what I think of management since I don't have doing any of it for real, but the ideal would be to somehow be able use the engineering skills I've got in school without having to sit at the computer or to purely technical stuff all day. So, project manager maybe? And that's what speaks for the generalist track, as a project manager it's probably good to be able to speak with a lot of different engineering professions.

 

[IRstuff]

I'm a firm believer that a manager should understand, to some level, what they're managing. That said, a proper manager won't be doing any engineering, only listening to engineers talk about their engineering.

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[AX3L]

IRstuff: I totally agree with you, and I also think that to be a good manager you have to have worked a few years yourself so that you've gotten some experience of your own. But I'm not sure about this management stuff, on one hand it seems a lot of fun because I think you will meet a lot of people and see many parts of the business, a specialist seems to be more at his personal office to me. And sure, I love engineering but if I have to sit at my office with matlab and do purely technical stuff all day I'll probably kill myself within a year.

But I might have gotten the whole idea of what a specialist is doing wrong, how alternating is it? Does it usually involves many pars of the projects or is a specialist usually someone who spend most of their time doing the things one do in school?