Choosing a Career

Send your CV/resume' to a recruiter in your geographical areas of interest. If you are indifferent to your near future course, take what's available. Who knows, you might find something you like.

And you have a distinct advantage over many other job seekers. You are employed. This gives you a much stronger position in case you have to negotiate things to get a new job.

Good Luck.

Plans are great but they often don't work out. Maybe you should consider your indecision as a good thing. Consider taking lynlynch's advise with a carefully crafted CV/Resume that opens you up to broad areas of employment without seeming like you have no direction. There is never a "correct answer" when fishing for a job, just be honest and try to use the best bait you can find.

Find something that you are passionate about and then become the best you can at it.

I would suggest you specialize in maintenance engineering.This field will enable you to apply hands on in the entire gamut of "automation and control engineer, instrument engineer, switchgear and protection engineer " etc.Another vital advantage for you would be you can be on your own with out having to work under a particular company. It is my experience that a good clue full maintenance engineer is worth his weight in gold.

I would suggest that you not limit your options at this stage in your career. Begin with your priorities- you want to explore opportunities in other geographic regions. There should be any number of recruiters looking for skilled individuals in the regions of interest to you. Look for opportunities that satisfy this desire first. Keep an open mind about what fields you might consider- there may be something out there that you have never heard of that would be considerably more exciting and interesting than anything you could dream of right now. Stay versatile until you have tasted the options...

Hello Guest,

With your confusion put in front of engineers, hope you will get the best solutions one after the other. Im X Lucky Cement (A&I) and remember the days when I was passing through similar situation. Operation and Maintenenc was just not sufficient for me.

Me and couple of my friends with similar thinking are now in the Middle East. We filled our heart with projects and services of Automation, Instrumentation in oil and gas, petrochemical,water and waste water, consumer process industry and BMS.

My observation in cement industry that manager insrtumentation might be the top position you can reach in instrumenatation as it is considered a sub division of elelctrical department or the situation there might be different now. Working in the ME is a wonderful experience.

Hi,

I would like to suggest to choose one career mean work as controls & automation engineer or either switchgear and protection engineer. But first need to understand the concept of that particular area of expertise. Learn how to design things and than how to erect and commission in the field. I used to work in my early career as an instrument engineer in Pakistan but when I move to Canada here I work with Oil & Gas industry as electrical design engineer. Presently I am living and working in United States and if you have a plan to move to USA the best career choice is electrical or controls engineer because they have a lack of engineers in this field. Might be this is helpful for your career choice and wish you good luck in future.

The so called Degree value what you have earned from institute is just a bunch of relevant knowledge on past, present and some glimpses into future.

What you have finished is just an understanding of multidisciplinary engineering and scientific knowledge.

You have to choose your area of interest and keep adding basic and handling knowledge. As a beginner you must be ambitious in adding knowledge by involvement in your work. That involvement and daily learning and contributions are testimonials to your capabilities.

So learn team work, team play and develop your knowledge into handling trouble shootings, hands on work including operative skills. Grab out best from experienced people around you and keep contributing and accepting responsibilities[ which your peers will assess about you]

Make your work culture in the lines of constant learning, sharing and adapting values from others, empathy, self assessment, benefit analysis, improvements, improvisations, innovations,work dedication apart from human skills like leadership, decision making skills etc- which could lift up your image and caliber levels.

So involve well into today's affairs because it is a great gift for duty.

Many of the freshers think too much about tomorrow and spoil today's happiness.

If you have capabilities, fast adaptabilities skills to changes and efficient and have the extra speciality skills your career scope is certain to be green.

Till then just become dutiful to your present job and add love and involvement as per your honest justification.

Know your strengths and weakness aspects and keep repairing the weakness aspects. You will find confidence flowing in you.

First of all, I encourage your vision for future career and hope you will succeed.

At this stage of career, you should concentrate on understanding the complete electrical system of your industry. Collect all the drawings (single line, interconnect, schematic, equipment arrangement, control/protection system) and catalogs, then clearly understand each and every one. Whenever you have chance, do trouble shooting using the drawing reference and be very comfort to this expertise. If you don't understand, feel free to ask the seniors how to read the drawings. Careers beginning with maintenance engineers have good opportunities to do this. I would say, an electrical engineer who has the ability and interest to identify a field problem using electrical drawing is the best engineer. In addition to electrical engineering, try to understand the instrument system (transmitter, controller, converter, control valve) and how they work. Once you have a strong field electrical engineering knowledge and experience, you built your base on electrical engineering. Then you can have your choice for further move. Your switchgear and protection course is really very important for your career as electrical engineering.

Additionally, learn some software like ETAP (www.etap.com) for Load flow study, Short Circuit calculation, Device coordination, Harmonic analysis, Motor acceleration, Arch flash etc., be familiar with basics of international standards like NEC, ANSI, IEC etc. and be very proficient in MS software (especially Word, Excel and Power point).

All these will help you to fulfill your career vision.

- MS