Engineers…MBAs…Economics…

It was an argument that a friend of mine brought up a couple of days back…..’why do you engineers, after your engineering degree want to do an MBA or a course in finance or economics and take our jobs too?’….my friend who raised this argument is finishing her commerce degree this year. If anybody else had argued the case I would have just shrugged it off with a you-should-be-smart-enough-to-hold-a-job gibe but she is one of my closest pals from school and that remark of hers got me thinking.

Most of us engineers never stop to think of the number of people, with degrees got over three years, who we put out of jobs every year.

It doesn’t take anyone too long to figure out whether the CEO of a company is going to back a candidate with an Engineering degree or one with a B.Sc or B.Comm degree. And why are we the pets of numerous prospective employers??? Because we’ve done a ‘professional’ course.

Just how many of us actually take up “professional” jobs ?how many engineers take up call center jobs every year? How many many engineers do an MBA- IIM or otherwise? How many engineers go back to the family business or get married? How many engineers of electronics, electrical, chemical and mechanical take up jobs in IT consultancy firms each year? Aren’t engineers with an MBA considered quite a combination / catch- for a job or a marriage? Just how many people in our lives have we met who take up one line of pursuit in education and in their career? Aren’t they more or less novelties?

In my three years of engineering at SVCE, whether or not I’ve become more knowledgeable about my engineering discipline, what I have gained are valuable insights and experiences in dealing with various kinds of people, lessons in team work, general knowledge in engineering, the knowledge that everything is inter-related and that more often than not engineering is just logic, common sense and an in-depth analysis backed by mathematical data, just as everything else is too. And its not just engineers from anywhere who don’t get engineering job opportunities without experience, even engineers from IITs face similar problems.

So just as it is mandatory for a good doctor to know the chemicals present in the drugs he prescribes so that he can account for back-firing drugs and side-effects, just as it is a done-deal that most textile designers know the dyes, processing chemicals and working of their looms, as any psychiatrist needs to know every patient’s background and daily environment, as every finance minister needs to know the intricacies of the supply and demand of every commodity in the market and their consumers, so too I believe does every engineer need to know his economics, balance sheet management, end-product consumers, competitors, stock-market, ethics, public relations, stress management and a bit of procrastination.

So if we step on a few toes in the process, sorry, but I doubt it can be helped!!!