Marketable skills for a mechanical PE

Everybody has to constantly try to improve his or her engineering skills if he wants to land a better job or simply grow with the current employer. What are the skills that are in most demand on the market that a mechanical engineer has to acquire in order to succeed? For instance, I would assume it is quite useful yo have good working knowledge of SolidWorks or another 3-D design program. What else? lease: :thankyou:

In what industry? In the MEP/Consulting industry, where the license is most often needed, I don't think most people could care less if you had SolidWorks experience. I know it is useless to our company.

SteveR said:

In what industry? In the MEP/Consulting industry, where the license is most often needed, I don't think most people could care less if you had SolidWorks experience. I know it is useless to our company.

Click to expand...

Steve, what would you say matters than from your experience?

Ironically, I would suggest that the most useful skills for a Mechanical Engineer to acquire are instrumentation and controls knowledge, especially PLCs and logic. As you progress in your Mechanical Engineering career, you will find in a number of fields, including both consulting and manufacturing, that having at least a working knowledge of the I&C realm (the more the better) will open doors for you into senior process positions, project mangagement and project engineering. This of course assumes that you have a good grasp of the mechanical end of things already. The more versatile and cross-disciplined you are, the more opportunities you will have.

I worked in product design for many years prior to getting my PE. I did SolidWorks and other 3-D programs, but that will not advance your career and they really DON'T care about license. That's why I left. In Mechanical, there is some demand for HVAC and other mechanical systems design for construction projects. I recommend expanding your knowledge some in other construction areas and really getting into project management. If you want to learn a program, MS Project and SureTrak are used by many companies for scheduling.