10 Engineering Careers You Should Know

Read Time: 6 minutes

You already know engineering interests you. The next step is getting a clearer picture of what engineers actually do.

Some engineering careers are easy to recognize by name. Others may be familiar mostly through the things they help create, from the infrastructure around you to the technology you use every day. And even the engineering fields you’ve heard of may involve work you wouldn’t expect.

These 10 careers are a starting point. They don’t cover every corner of engineering, but they’ll give you a useful map of some of the major paths and the very different problems engineers spend their time solving.

1. Mechanical Engineer

Mechanical engineers design, build, and test machines and other devices that involve movement, forces, or heat. That can mean working on an engine or manufacturing machine, but it can also mean developing medical devices, batteries, heating and cooling systems, or parts of a robot.

One way to spot mechanical engineering is to look for the moving parts. If something needs to move, transfer energy, stay at the right temperature, or physically function the way it was designed to, a mechanical engineer may have had a hand in making it work.

2. Civil Engineer

Civil engineers work on the infrastructure people use every day: roads, bridges, buildings, tunnels, airports, water systems, and more. They may analyze whether soil can support a structure, design transportation systems, review construction plans, or make sure a project meets safety requirements.

And “civil engineer” is a bigger category than it may initially sound. Structural engineers focus on whether buildings and bridges can safely withstand the forces acting on them. Transportation engineers tackle roads, transit systems, airports, and traffic. Geotechnical engineers concentrate on the ground underneath everything we’re building. If you’re interested in engineering on the scale of neighborhoods, cities, and the systems that connect them, you’re looking at a whole family of civil engineering careers.

3. Electrical Engineer

Electrical engineers design and develop systems and equipment that use electricity and electronics. Their work can show up in everything from electric motors and power generation to communications technology, navigation systems, and electronic components.

It’s an enormous range. One electrical engineer might work on the systems that deliver power across a community, while another focuses on electronics small enough to fit inside something you hold in your hand. The field stretches from the power grid to the devices plugged into it.

Want to see how several branches of engineering come together? NSLC’s pre-college Engineering program explores civil, mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering through hands-on projects and challenges.

4. Aerospace Engineer

Aerospace engineers design and test aircraft, spacecraft, satellites, and related technologies. The rockets and airplanes are the obvious part. The career itself involves solving much more specific problems: How will a vehicle move through air or space? How much weight can it carry? Can its components handle the forces they’ll experience?

And aerospace engineering isn’t synonymous with “working for NASA.” Aerospace engineers work across aviation, defense, spacecraft, satellites, research, and manufacturing. What connects those jobs isn’t one employer or even one type of vehicle. It’s the challenge of engineering something that needs to fly, orbit, or operate beyond the ground.

If this is the branch that caught your attention, NSLC’s Aerospace program helps you explore aircraft and spacecraft engineering through hands-on design.

5. Biomedical Engineer

Biomedical engineers bring engineering into medicine and biology. They help create technologies such as medical equipment, devices, computer systems, and other tools used in healthcare and biological science.

Think about something like a prosthetic limb. It has to work with the human body, but it also has to be designed, built, tested, and improved as a physical device. The problem isn’t purely medical or purely mechanical. For someone whose interests seem split between engineering and human health, biomedical engineering is one place where they don’t have to be.

6. Chemical Engineer

Despite the name, chemical engineers don’t necessarily spend their careers standing at lab benches mixing chemicals. They use chemistry, physics, and engineering to design processes and equipment for making products.

The key word is “process”. A chemist might discover or study a substance. A chemical engineer might help figure out how to produce something involving that chemistry safely, consistently, and at enormous scale. Pharmaceuticals, energy, food, electronics, materials, and consumer products can all involve chemical engineering, which is a much bigger world than the career name tends to suggest.

7. Environmental Engineer

Environmental engineers use engineering to solve problems involving human activity and the environment. Their work can involve water and wastewater treatment, pollution control, waste management, environmental cleanup, or designing systems that reduce environmental harm.

Here, an environmental concern becomes an engineering problem. It’s not only What’s happening to this water, soil, or environment? An environmental engineer may be responsible for the next question: What can we design or build to do something about it?

8. Industrial Engineer

Industrial engineers don’t design one particular kind of object. They figure out better ways for entire systems to work.

Imagine a factory where employees are constantly waiting for materials to arrive, equipment sits unused, and products take twice as long to make as they should. An industrial engineer might study that whole process and redesign how people, machines, information, and materials move through it. Manufacturing is an obvious home for this work, but the same kind of systems thinking can apply in plenty of other settings.

Instead of asking “How should we build this machine?”, an industrial engineer may be looking around the whole operation and asking, “How should all of this work together?”

9. Robotics Engineer

A robot needs more than someone who knows how to code it. Someone also has to figure out how it will physically move, sense what’s around it, interact with objects, and perform its job reliably.

Robotics can pull together mechanical systems, electronics, sensors, controls, and software. An engineer might work on an entire robotic system or specialize in one piece of it, such as how a robotic arm moves or how sensors allow a robot to detect what’s around it.

So despite the very cool job title, a robotics engineer isn’t necessarily sitting down and building a whole robot from scratch. The career often lives where several different branches of engineering meet.

10. Materials Engineer

Before an engineer can design something, somebody may need to answer a surprisingly important question: What should we make it out of?

Materials engineers develop, process, and test the materials used in products. Depending on the problem, a material may need to be unusually light, strong, flexible, conductive, heat-resistant, corrosion-resistant, or some combination that isn’t easy to achieve.

A better battery, safer vehicle, stronger building component, lighter aircraft, or new electronic device may depend on getting that choice right. Materials engineers can be behind major advances without designing the finished product anyone eventually sees.

Where Do You Start Exploring?

These 10 careers are only a starting point. There are many more engineering careers to explore, including agricultural engineers, nuclear engineers, marine engineers, computer hardware engineers, mining and geological engineers, and plenty of other paths we haven’t touched yet. And within many of those careers, there are even more directions to explore.

You don’t need to sort through all of them at once. Start with whatever made you curious enough to keep digging. What does an aerospace engineer actually work on when they aren’t designing a spacecraft? How does a materials engineer figure out what a new product should be made of? Where does robotics stop being mechanical engineering and start becoming electrical engineering or computer science?

Knowing the major paths within engineering gives you a map of a very big field. As you fill in more of that map, “I’m interested in engineering” can start becoming something more specific: the problems you want to solve, the things you want to build, and the part of engineering that makes you want to keep exploring.

—

Want to get hands-on engineering experience before college? Check out all of NSLC’s Engineering summer programs and explore your future.