 Hello everyone, so I know landing your first full-time job after graduation can be hard even if you have an engineering degree, recently I've had that person ask me this on Instagram. Perhaps people are having trouble finding a job after graduation, especially during this COVID period or through other downturns. But engineering degree is quite a versatile degree in the sense that the rigorous technical nature of the program allows you to be marketable to many other career opportunities since getting the degree requires you to have good problem-solving abilities and quantitative skills. Since my background is in mining engineering, I'll look at some of these careers from a mining perspective. If you aren't in mining, one benefit is that it is specialized enough that it will position you very favorably for some of these careers that I'm about to mention, especially for the natural resource divisions of the finance industry. So today we'll be talking about the six careers you can go into with a engineering degree. Make sure you stay until the very end because I'll give you the one trick that will dramatically increase your chances of getting into any of these careers. So the first one is investment banking. To borrow investopedious definition, investment bankers help their clients raise money in the capital markets, provide various financial advisory services, and assist with murders and acquisition activity, or MNA for short. These clients can include governments, corporations, and institutional investors. As an investment banker, you'll be responsible for MNA and underwriting. For MNA advisory, you will assist in the negotiation and structuring of a merger or acquisition. Essentially, you'll help put together an attractive deal for a company to be purchased as part of a merger or acquisition. For underwriting, you'll help a company raise capital through selling stocks or bonds to investors. Essentially, you help a company put together an attractive valuation that will allow a company to sell their company shares, whether it is through stocks or bonds to gain capital. So what skills will you need to succeed as an investment banker? You need to know financial modeling, business valuation, sales skills in terms of building a pitch book and presentation, and you also need to have good negotiation skills to name a few. While you may not have some of these quantitative skills straight out of college, there are courses you can take to learn these skills, and many people have agreed that it's more than possible for engineers to pick these skills up since they have a strong quantitative and analytical background. Investment banking can be one of the most lucrative career that you can enter into, with graduates making $125,000 to $200,000 per year in your first few years out of university. The pay increases at a steeper rate as you climb through the ranks, and your bonus can easily exceed your base salary. However, investment banking is also known to have some of the most brutal working hours there can be. Analysts can expect work hours to be upwards of 80 to 100 hours per week. Next up we have equity research, and if the hours of investment banking scares you, but you still want to work in finance, then perhaps equity research may be better suited for you. Equity researchers are a part of an investment bank that produces in-depth reports on portfolio companies, and ultimately they'll issue a buy, hold, or sell recommendation for the bank or clients to act on. Your main responsibility in this role will be to conduct research on your portfolio company, perform financial modeling of the company, and summarize your findings in a report, including the recommended investment decision. Equity researchers typically work a 60 to 70 hour work week, which is at least 20 hours more than a typical engineering role, but much better compared to an investment banker. The pay will be less than an investment banker as well, but you'll make between $125,000 to $145,000 in total compensation after your first few years out of college. Next up we have management consulting. This could be a career for you if you don't like pure finance, but still want to work in business. So management consultants provide advisory services for management to solve management and business problems. We can think of management consultants to be split into two streams. The first stream is strategy consulting, where you help develop a strategy for the management to achieve a certain objective. The second stream is implementation consulting, where you help the management implement the proposed strategy. Some examples of the projects you may work on is company growth or expansion, reorganization, downsizing, and launching new corporate initiatives or technology. So management consulting can be a lucrative career since you can make anywhere from $75,000 to $108,000 per year in total compensation in your first few years after university. But it is known to be a high stress career and you need to work 50 to 80 hours per week depending on the project you're assigned to. This can be a great career for you if you're interested in learning about different industries in a short amount of time and it's also a great career growth accelerator. The crux of success in this career will be problem solving skills. As an engineer, if you're able to demonstrate that you have a good analytical mindset and ability to solve problems, then you should be able to enter into this field. For software consultant or sales, if you have worked as an engineer, chances are you have worked with a software at one time or another. What it is through AutoCAD, if you're a mechanical engineer, Civil 3D, if you're in civil or mind-planning software such as Falcon, DeskWake, or MindSite, all of these software companies are open to hiring engineers. As a consultant, you'll be mainly responsible for helping the clients implement the software and assist with troubleshooting issues the clients may have with using the software. Not only are you required to have a good knowledge of the software which you'll be trained with further even if you are a previous user, but you'll also need to have good customer service skills. As a salesperson, you need to have good knowledge of the product but your main role is to convince potential clients that your company's software is a good fit for them. So you'll need excellent sales pitching skills and interpersonal abilities in order to succeed in this role. Total compensation for those who are new into this career can be anywhere from $50,000 to $80,000 plus and can be highly dependent on what the bonus and commission structure is like. If you like traveling, this could be the career for you since you need to be deployed into a client's office whether you are a consultant or in sales so you can interact with them in your respective roles. Original equipment manufacturers or OEM sales for short is pretty similar to software sales except that you're selling hardware or equipment. The consultant and sales role from the software side is still applicable here and the compensation and lifestyle is pretty similar as well. For the mining, civil and mechanical engineers, some of the OEM companies you can go into are Komatsu, Chattopillar, Sandvik and Epiroc. Lastly, there is academia. To go into academia or become a professor, you typically need to complete your PhD degree and ideally you have some notable contribution in your field such as publishing journal papers. The competition is very fierce because usually there are a lot more PhDs than there are professor positions therefore you likely have to apply for positions around the country or even around the world. The holy grail of the professor career path is to attain a 10-year position which is a permanent position that will allow you to teach and research as you want without getting fired and in order to secure a 10-year position typically you have to spend at least five per year teaching in a 10-year track position. The average salary for a professor is $75,000 per year and can go up to $160,000 per year plus depending on the size of the school, the course and your seniority. So there you have it, the six careers you can go into with any engineering degree besides engineering itself. Now the one tip that I promise that would dramatically increase your chances of getting into these career is field experience. Field experience can vary depending on the industry you're in but basically it means getting as close to the heart of the action as you can. For civil engineers this could be being on site one of your tunnel projects. For mechanical engineers this could mean being as close to whatever mechanical system you're working on. For mining engineers this would mean spending time at an active mine site and being out in the field. I'm going to explain why field experience is so important for these career paths from the mining perspective since that's my background and you can replace mining field experience with whatever discipline you're in to fill in the blanks. For all of these careers they rely on not only your knowledge of the industry that you're in but as well as your experience. Your experience at a mining operation for example is what will separate you from the rest of the candidates since that first-hand experience will allow you to bring to the table special insights that business or marketing or academia candidates wouldn't have. You'll be able to read between the lines when interpreting annual reports as an investment banker or equity research analyst or identify clients need in advance when working with mining software or equipment manufacturers. Even if you're working as a professor your experience at a mining operation will allow you to bring stories and context into whatever course you're teaching and that will make your lessons a lot more engaging. Field experience is everything and whether you want to stay as an engineer or try something new it is still relevant. So that's it for this video if you are new to this channel make sure you subscribe so you don't miss my next mining engineering video. 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