• Question: are there different types of engineers and if so how many are there?

    Asked by bartong0303 to Alex, Claire, Kate, Marcus, Neil on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by emliz.
    • Photo: Alex Lyness

      Alex Lyness answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Hey barton0303,

      There are many hundreds of engineers I am sure of it. Some are more specialised than others and all have a purpose.

      Just check out a list like this one: http://education-portal.com/article_directory/q_p/page/Engineering/q_p/Careers_and_Occupations_List.html

      As you can see engineers are needed to do all sorts of jobs, of all different sizes in all different parts of the world.

    • Photo: Kate Niehaus

      Kate Niehaus answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      There are so many types! Just to list a few and to mention a small subset of the types of things they may work on:
      – aerospace/aeronautical engineers – planes, jets
      – bioengineers – medical devices like stents or pacemakers; algorithms to predict disease conditions; synthetic tissue
      – chemical engineers – new pharmaceutical drugs; fuel cells
      – civil engineers – bridges; buildings
      – electrical engineers – solar panels; iphones (the electric parts); electric circuits
      – environmental engineers – energy management; pollution/water supply management
      – industrial engineers – how to allocate resources
      – mechanical engineers – robots; iphones (the mechanical parts)
      – petroleum engineers – oil drilling
      – software/computer engineers – google; database systems; algorithm design

      Not only are there many types of engineers, but there are many types of engineering jobs. Depending on your job and what you enjoy doing more, you can spend most of your time on math work; conducting experiments; writing computer code; communicating about your work; writing grants; overseeing construction; managing other engineers; etc; etc!

    • Photo: Claire Brockett

      Claire Brockett answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      As Alex and Kate have said, there are lots of different types of engineer. Think about anything you do during the day (taking the bus/car/train to college/school, working on a computer, eating cooked food, sitting on a chair, crossing the road, brushing your teeth, watching TV) and there’s an engineer somewhere that’s contributed to it.
      I think one of the engineering jobs that surprised me is a friend of mine is a civil engineer, and part of her role is to look at road design to reduce the chance of accidents happening.
      Even when you get into a specialist branch of engineering, there are still many roles. For example, my work is to do with replacement joints – so during the development of a new design there are:
      Design engineers
      Test engineers
      Research engineers
      Manufacturing engineers
      Quality engineers
      and many others – and that’s just to get an ankle replacement from being an idea to being made.

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