Career Path

As a younger engineer, I've come to a point in my career where I need to choose a path. I feel that many engineers (at least those who I've encountered) have stumbled upon this dilemma at one point or another. The paths are, of course, technical specialty or project/program management.

I cannot comment on other industries, however for my organization it appears that these two avenues only intersect once. Most people develop their technical expertise up to a certain point, then choose to either manage programs and rely on technical consultants or become extremely specialized in their field and uphold an advisory role, if you will. 

For the more seasoned veterans on this forum, I'm curious to know what your stories are and which path you decided to take. 

Thank you for sharing!

Very similar career paths with my respective employer.  I am presently headed down the technical/specialized track vs. proj. management.  But at the same time, I haven't completely dismissed the PM role either.  I think to be a good technical project lead, one also should possess some level of PM skills.  And a good amount of this comes from actual field experience in being a project leader.  PM courses can help in offering different perspectives on how to approach things (and also provide tools to effectively manage).  But most of those situations are arbitrary and do not directly affect you and your career.  Once face with decisions like that, I think it will present a greater learning opportunity.

I went down a similar path as well. In the organization I work for you can have a Ph.D in every discipline in engineering and still be a project engineer. The only two ways to advance is get your PE license and start applying for those PM jobs (higher paid position) or get your MBA and go to another department. The options are very limited in our organization. There is a third option where you leave the organization as a whole. Several of my colleagues have left in recent months for higher paying positions in the PM role.

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk

I think the path towards either SR Engineer or Project Management exists in all engineering industries.   I went the PM route after a long tour of duty working for gubernment- I was private consultant for 9 years, then did 8 years in local government, now 3 years back in the private world as a "Sr PM" I guess SR just means I make a few more bucks than a regular PM?

For my field (Civil- Transportation) the main difference in being a PM or a Sr EGR is the added stress (or fun) of chasing work, dealing with contracts, owners, clients directly, managing sub-consultants, schedules, managing other staff, etc.

We have a lot of people that pursue the SR EGR route because they don't like those "headaches"

But being a PM, & this is something I tell all my starry eyed newbs at work, is something that does require some grey "engineering' hair, but is also very much an administrative role, you have to like talking on the pone, be responsive to emails, be able to delegate, understand how projects make money, sacrifice your own time, etc.. 

The main difference between people at my work with the same years of experience as me, but on the SR EGR track, is they can use the current software programs and I cant in all reality.  You move from more of a "create the plans" role to a "review and approve the plans role"  There are days I would rather be grunting out the work instead of worrying about where the next work is coming from, or having to figure out a way to do work that wasn't in the contract, or approach the owner and tell them that they didn't put something in our contract and beg for more $$.  Also I don't always care for the salesman part of the job either, but someone has to do it...