I’ve asked this question of people since 2012, and there does seem to be a trend towards what you guys are saying. People who have trained for specialied positions can’t find work in them anymore, due to rapid obsolescence and a unwillingness on societies’ part to retrain. Others, conversely, who have a more generalised field of knowledge are turned away for not knowing the specifics demanded by particular companies for particular tasks. This trend seems to have started around the early to mid 70s, and has resulted in companies wanting engineers as “screwdrivers” instead of designers. Considering the rate of technological progress, and the length of education, this is somewhat frightening.

Pictured: Modern engineering prospects

Personally, I’ve been following your paths, to an extent. I’m pursueing the college route, which is taking longer than I thought (or would like to have spent, for that matter), and hope to intern with a small to mid-sized aerospace company either during my latter years in the system, or immediately afterwards. Coding isn’t my forte, but I’ve picked up a knack for techical documentation, which I have put to professional use in the past.

Being an engineer has never been easy, and looking at the past 50 years, it’s become even more difficult. Nowadays, for most professions, you need to know not just your field, but the field of others immediately related to yours as well. If you want to take charge in your chosen field, then you need to not only become an engineer and a scientist, but a businessman and an oracle as well – otherwise, the best you can hope for is scraps. I don’t want to be Elon Musk, but I don’t want to be a gear either. As always, this means more work; not just for the world we have, but the world that can be made.

Fortunately, as engineers, making things is our specialty. P.A.A.A!

I’m not sure that path is possible any more, though. I entered the engineering job market at a time when, it was said, an engineer who wanted a new job simply turned into a different driveway in the morning. And it did seem that effortless, that friction-free, at least for the first 30 years or so. I kept trading up by leveraging the experience at my last job: My high school had a strong electronics and broadcasting course, and an instructor with connections, which got me my first job as a technician. Then when I had a track record as a technician, I could imperceptibly slide into design and end up with a job title with “engineer” in it. Marketing pukes noticed I could both talk to engineers and normal people, so they made me a sales engineer; and from there I moved into technical publications. Combining tech pubs with programming knowledge let me write automated publishing systems, and when the web came along and a client (I was freelancing by then) wanted to know if I could port the system to HTML, I said, “sure, why not?” and became a web developer. And so the Zone was born.

But VRB, things have changed. Capitalists regained control of the job market, and the Internet let them hire bodies from the cheapest corners of the Earth (yeah, we screwed ourselves when we built the Net). Having a hungry job market let them get lazy about hiring, and rather than evaluating individuals, they could just create a list of bullet points, including a specific level of educational attainment in specific disciplines. Computers now screen resumes, and see if your bullet points match up with theirs. It sucks big time. Employment creates strong pressure to specialize so as to pass through the automated filters.

I’m not disputing podrock’s vision of the engineering Renaissance Man, VRBlade. I wouldn’t have done it any other way, and I’m proud to call myself a generalist. But you will have to adapt to the changed circumstances. Freelancing is a hard, heartbreaking way to live now, what with global competition across the Net. If you can, get a salaried gig as an employee with a big corporation to start. That’ll let you build a resume, and then when you have experience and contacts, it’ll be easier to go freelance on your own terms, and graze on whatever interests you.

One of the things I’ve encountered several times in the 21st century is that the corporations have figured out how to coopt startups, turning them into “farm teams” that outsource R&D with significant tax advantages. I’m afraid that startups don’t happen in a garage any more. It’s common now for a corporate employee to tell their boss of their intentions to found a startup, and be directed to the corporation’s investment fund. The fund managers will either provide the funding, keeping ownership in-house, or farm it out to a network of other corporate venture capital funds. The startup route, if successful, gives you independence, through money, to chart your own course after the first one. With a billion dollars in the bank, you can be whatever kind of Renaissance Man you want. You could even be Elon Musk, though I don’t recommend it.

There are probably as many answers to your question, Blade, as there are engineers. Ultimately you’ll have to puzzle it out. Good luck, man!

It is impossible to be an expert in all these fields. But when you need to solve a problem, you either learn enough about three dimensional trigonometry to plot your drill holes, learn a computer program to do what you need, or you talk to an expert in that field. Or all three. That’s just science. And as long as you have new problems to solve, this process never stops.

Mr. Wilson coined a term for something that already existed – Liberal Arts. Yeah, that term, and the concept, gets trashed by some; but I have found that my four years at a liberal arts college was a wise investment. I have a Bachelors Degree of Arts in Geology and I’m quite proud of that. Because problem solving is an art. And science is problem solving. So is engineering. Buckminster Fuller said that human beings are information gatherers and problem solvers. I have a richer life that I also studied literature, music, philosophy, etc. I had enough credits to be an English major.

I echo the wise words of hank and ER. Also, Lao Tsu says, “be flexible as the reed, adaptable as water.” (That’s a paraphrase, something I learned in college.) Being a geologist means riding the waves of the boom-bust cycle. Work, save, get laid off, go to school, work, get laid off, become a consultant. Rinse and repeat.

No, study what you love, get really good at something you really enjoy doing even if you never use it on the job. The best value of an education is in learning how complex the world can be. The specific complexity you’ll be confronted with at work is best learned there, from experience and mentors. Chances are you’ll have to learn your profession with OJT anyway, your boss really won’t care what you have your degree in, he just wants someone who was capable of getting one, who had the discipline and dedication to stick to something for years. If he wants a bank manager, that degree in ancient languages or medieval art is just as good as one in finance, marketing or business administration. Besides, why go to college to learn non-technical material? You can go to the library or on the internet and teach yourself that nonsense as soon as you’ve mastered reading and grammar. Look at how many computer geeks started out in something else altogether. Even lawyers are often recommended to do undergraduate work in other fields to round out their legal training.

Of course, if what you want to do requires certification or licencing, like law, medicine, or accounting, then academic training may be necessary after all. In the STEM area, it is also difficult to pick up what you might need to know about physics, chemistry or math without formal education as well. But as a rule, most of the people who are successful in most non-tech fields, particularly business or management, didn’t get their education in those fields. They are generalists, not specialists; quick learners, not detailed and meticulous craftsmen. THAT is what your boss will be really looking for. As far as he’s concerned, that degree “requirement” just weeds out the lazy and the stupid.

In those days, they were so desperate for programmers they were hiring anybody who could code; if you had a math/science background, you went into scientific/engineering applications. Those without that hard training went into commercial and financial data processing instead. Programming for dedicated systems support and development was reserved for university-trained “systems engineers” who coded in machine or assembly language, or for folks from the other two paths who found that work interesting.

When I was coming up through my career, I found myself mostly attracted to work involved in earth resources and mapping, so I wound up working in shops that specialized in air photo mapping, automated cartography and computer mapping, satellite imagery, remote sensing, image processing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). I went back to school and got my MA in Geography mostly because it looked good on my CV. It was a fascinating field of study in its own right, but I learned absolutely nothing that helped me on the job. My thesis was on the statistical distribution of residential swimming pools in Tampa, Florida.

This plan would not work today. Everything is different, you don’t learn general math and science and then apply it to a specific industry or discipline or application. Back then, you picked up the computer background as a sideline, as a tool. Today, you study computer technology as an end in itself. Once I mastered Fortran, I didn’t have to worry about “keeping up” with the technology, I simply concentrated on learning about geochemistry, geophysics, petroleum exploration, geodesy, military/espionage applications, natural resources, urban planning or whatever I was applying the technology to. For twenty years I was a Fortran programmer, and a pretty damned good one. But over the years I began to see how my plan was no longer very applicable to my future career development. Fortran, in fact, all application languages, were becoming obsolete.

Nobody cared any more what my extensive cartography/mapping experience was either, all that really mattered was if I was checked out on the latest version of ArcInfo or how many database programs I knew. I went from a consultant to hard science PhDs to a machine operator tasked to support administrative weenies and management drones. Instead of coding math and physics algorithms, I needed to master user interfaces. Needless to say, I got out just in time. Fortunately, in those days, jobs came with retirement pension plans.

What advice would I give to someone starting out in the field today? I haven’t a clue. Everything seems to have changed. I’ve always loved science and math for their own sake, although I was never particularly talented at either. I picked up enough that I was able to earn a good living at it then, but I doubt I could if I did the same today. If I had to do it all over again, starting from scratch in my early 20s, I thing I would study music or languages.