Online engineering programs give you just as many career path options as traditional brick-and-mortar college programs – and for new engineering students, the choices can seem a bit overwhelming. Let’s talk about your options if you’re interested in a career in engineering.
Engineering Specialties
The jobs you can take as an engineer depend almost completely on your specialty. All engineers work to solve practical problems with real-world mathematical solutions, but your exact specialty allows you choose a specific industry. These engineering specialties include:
- Aerospace – designing, building, and testing aircraft, missiles, rockets, satellites, and more
- Bioengineering/Biochemical – studying living systems
- Biomedical – developing advances in healthcare technology
- Chemical – studying and using chemicals to improve manufacturing
- Civil – design and build structures
- Computer – working with computers and networks
- Electrical – developing and improving electrical technologies
- Environmental – protecting the world through minimizing pollution and cleaning the environment
- Industrial – planning how to best use human resources, machines, materials, and more in production
- Mechanical – designing new mechanical technologies
This is, of course, is not by far a completely list of all the types of engineering specialties you can consider. Within each, you also have smaller niches so you can even further specialize. For example, in electrical engineering, you can work specifically with macro electrical engineering, working with large grids that control the power to entire cities, are you can work with electronics, developing the next general of your favorite phone or MP3 player.
Engineering Tasks
The tasks you’ll do in whatever engineering specialization you choose can range from developing and designing work to building and testing. Engineers are need in all stages of a project, and often work with teams of other experts to create the best results. For example, if you’re a civil engineer working to build a new skyscraper, you might also work with an architect, a city planner, non-profit fundraising groups, business owners and investors, interior decorators, and more.
Project Management
As you advance as an engineer, you can also consider becoming a project manager. In this kind of engineering role, you’ll lead teams of engineers coming from multiple backgrounds to work on a single project. If you are a natural leader and enjoy working in a team environment, this might be the perfect job for you.
