Kindly counsel me on my career

I had a similar "mid-life crisis" in my engineering career where I wanted to unchain myself from the CAD terminal. My solution was to move into a sales application engineering position within my same company to have the opportunity to travel and interact with people. (Not to mention the opportunity to make more money).

If there is not a suitable sales position within you company, look to the outside vendors whom you purchase in you existing management position. You can offer them vast experience on what affects purchasing decisions.

Thank you very much for your invaulable, unquantifiable advice. I am therefore thinking of doing further studies in the UK........... I am in a cross road in determining a top business school in UK that would admit me with just 3years experience in Project managemet practice and I am also constrained with funds. As I only have a £11,000 budget for this proposed studies.

Please what do you advice?

Thanks for being a lifeline.

Would you like to go for Energy Audit which is new subject or Envoirmental Engineering. I think both courses may be availble in U.K.

You may wish to consider becoming a patent agent. A patent agent is like a journalist. His job is to write-down the story of an invention.

The drafting of a patent specification is quite a delicate matter. While it is clearly an exaggeration in some respects, a comparison with brain surgery is not out of the question. When a patent specification is properly drafted, everything has been done correctly. There are very few properly drafted patent specifications. The Wright Brothers patent, which they wrote originally themselves, had many deficiencies. If litigated today it would not stand-up the way it did in 1910.

As a patent agent, your relationship with your client is critical. You will have to make requests of the client that the client does not want to hear. You will have to tell the client that further research is required, research that they will not want to carryout. You'll have to warn them that their patent will suffer if they don't take your advice, but if they don't take your advice, you have to proceed with what you have in hand. The work is intellectually challenging and quite satisfying if done properly.

What is just been described is the real work of a patent agent. However, in Canada over 90% of Canadian patent filings originate from foreigners. In these circumstances, an employed patent agent may often find himself assigned to the role of operating a post office. Applications come in from abroad fully prepared. After a cursory review, they are filed at the patent office. The real work for such a patent agent only arises three or four years later when the examiner objects to aspects of the application, and even then, most foreign patent attorneys generally take principal responsibility for preparing the Response.

Although, technically, patent agents are only licensed to draft patent applications, many, indeed most of them will provide advice to clients in situations where a patent is thought to be infringed. This can include both representing the owner of a patent and representing the person accused of infringement. These types of services are very lawyer-like in their nature, but a patent agent would never appear in court, at least in Canada, on behalf of a litigant. The exercise of advising on an infringement situation includes either challenging or defending the sufficiency of a patent specification. The work is intellectually challenging and tends to be most engrossing. It helps greatly to be an engineer.