its up to the engineering student to be "picky" and willing to take the risk of going after technically challenging jobs rather than to choose the easy way and go into fringe engineering jobs such as sales engineer, project management, glorified technicians etc.

R&D, design, consultancy, site engineer (resident engineer) is where most of the technical challenge are.

and another trend is that not many engineer end up as technical super-experts, as most eventually moved on to less technical roles such as managers, directors, etc that offer more pay.

my lecturer defines an engineer as someone who does design work. some good maintenance engineer actually learn from doing maintenance and tweaks the system and modifies it to be more easily accessible, less breakdown, faster servicing, etc.

compare that to some maintenance who only follow schedule and basically acts like a drone.

same goes for operations. increased production rates with less scraps etc.

i have yet to find a sales engineer that does any significant design work (i may be wrong, as i dont know everything )

This post has been edited by lin00b: Apr 25 2010, 01:20 PM

not really, design does not necessary need to be related to creation. if you can improve on an existing system, i think you are doing some designing as well.