CAREER FOCUS
Choose Your Own Professional Adventure
Engineers are no longer limited to a single career for the entirety of their professional journey.
Written by Robin L. Flanigan
ITCHING TO PURSUE A CAREER BEYOND ENGINEERING? Luckily, the era of the 40-year career is over. Mechanical engineers have multiple skills—analytical, troubleshooting, and technical competence among them—that can easily translate to a different sector of the workforce.
“Engineering education teaches you how to be a problem-solver,” said Manjula Selvarajah, who earned a mechanical engineering degree and now works as a journalist, producer, and syndicated technology columnist in Toronto. “It teaches you how to take things down to first principles and re-examine things. Those skills—and also the fact that getting an engineering degree is really a lot of work—prepares you for a lot of workplaces and doing hard things.”
It comes down to the fact that “engineers have a practice of understanding a problem and being able to explain it in very simple language,” she added.
Selvarajah put this into practice for a recent episode of the podcast Solve for X, in which she toured the world’s largest lake-powered cooling system. Using water from nearby Lake Ontario, the system cools approximately 100 buildings downtown, including hospitals.
“[Engineering] skills—and also the fact that getting an engineering degree is really a lot of work—prepares you for a lot of workplaces and doing hard things.”
—Manjula Selvarajah, a mechanical engineer, journalist, producer, and syndicated technology columnist in Toronto
“Here was this immensely expensive, incredibly complicated system, and I was able to understand it and explain it to my podcast listeners,” she recalled. “And I have a varied audience, from my nephew to maybe some investor in Vancouver to maybe someone who just cares about the climate in Boston. Being able to understand complex things and then boil them down is a skill that I really treasure.”
Other career paths that require skills often used by engineers include technical writing, consulting, product management, data science, and supply chain management.
Benson Wallace grew up wanting to be a rocket scientist. The former mechanical engineer, based in Sri Lanka, gave up on that idea after leaving the military but figured out that he may be able to inspire others to follow similar paths in his current role teaching STEM to teens and young adults.
A lot of people comment on the drastic change in salary accompanying that career shift, but “it’s more important to do something you want to get out of bed to do, to feel you’re doing something important,” Wallace said. “That’s a big part of my motivation. I wonder how many students I can influence over the course of this career.”
And after recently earning his master’s degree in STEM education, Wallace feels like “the world is my oyster.”
Selvarajah receives “a ton of one-time mentoring calls a year” from people seeking advice on transitioning careers. Her advice is to sit down and figure out what skills you have, what you want to do, and when you’ll be ready to act.
In the process, think about yourself as an island and your next career as another island, Selvarajah explained. Are you going to swim? Or are you going to figure out where the bridges are, and where the boats and ferries are leaving from?
Swimming might mean you have no connections in that space and haven’t made efforts to make any. Selvarajah noted the other option means finding 10 people already working in that space, “then interviewing them to figure out ‘Is this possible? Do I have the skills? What are their days like? Is that space dying or exploding?’”
Selvarajah did the latter. “Otherwise, journalism for me would’ve meant a ‘swim.’ This made the transition a lot easier,” she added.
If you’re curious about a new field, “find a way to see if you can experience it a little bit first before going all in,” he said. If you do go all in and find it tough going—you may even question whether you’ve made the wrong decision—give it a little bit of time. “Once you get through ‘the dip,’ you might start to really enjoy it, and even identify with it,” he added.
On the more practical side, Benson also recommended making sure you have a “solid financial foundation before jumping off a ledge.”
Selvarajah encourages other engineers to expand the scope of their careers for a broader purpose.
She believes this is a global time of need when it comes both to physical and digital infrastructure, as well as policy and innovation, and that engineers are well-primed to become policy makers, politicians, advocates, and other roles that allow them to contribute to their communities in a larger way.
“You’ve displayed that you’re able to work really hard, study really hard, and do hard things,” she said. “I’m biased, but I think this is a time for engineers to step up.”
Robin L. Flanigan is an independent writer in Rochester, N.Y.
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