Engineers are amongst the most versatile and multi-talented professionals of all. And with the current trend of engineers foraying into various disciplines, they can escape the rat race if they want and pursue something else even more passionately.
Here are a few career options you can look at if you have an engineering degree but do not wish to be an engineer.
Writer
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Obtaining an engineering degree is no piece of cake. You have to acquaint yourself with technology and science extensively. You can utilize this knowledge combined with your creativity to become a writer- be it articles or science fiction.
The rich experiences and the intellectual maturity of engineers make this a lucrative option. Technical writing jobs pay exceptionally well.
Filmmakers
Being well-versed in technology makes it easier for engineers to handle the equipment. Also, the uncanny experiences in engineering make them more creatively inclined and hence more successful in this venture.
You will be great at creating sci-fi movies because of your experience in the territory.
Attention to detail, along with an artistic instinct, makes photography a lucrative option with high success rates. Many engineering colleges have photography clubs that encourage the shutterbug in you.
If physics and optics are right up your sleeve and you desire to capture moments, then photography is the alley for you.
Event Management
Engineers are rough and tough people with excellent communication skills, and they also have a way with people. They can work under pressure and handle deadlines. Such qualities are ideal in the field of event management.
Entrepreneurs
With highly industrious and enterprising personas and the highest percentage of MBA aspirants, the field of engineering has potential entrepreneurs who can change the world.
Many engineers divert into business and put their skills to use.
Game Designing
All the gadget freaks and game enthusiasts who are bored of their routine job can opt for game designing as it is a highly creative and well-paying field that will utilize your tech knowledge to the fullest.
So, all the engineers out there, don’t worry if you didn’t find the right engineering job for you because there are a lot other options.
The power of the pen has torn people apart and brought them closer. Writing is an integral aspect of worldly life, and writers influence everything.
From a work of literary genius to a simple billboard advertisement, writing provides some of the most sought-after and fulfilling careers.
Here are a few career options for you if you are passionate about putting your thoughts on paper!
Greeting Card Author:
From birthday cards to Valentine’s day posters, the role of greeting cards is not obsolete even in today’s savvy culture. We will always use greeting cards to convey our heartfelt feelings to the special people in our lives as they are more personalised and classy.
Famous greeting card companies are constantly looking for talented greeting card authors who can pen down earnest and loving messages for their cards.
From Sidney Sheldon to Salman Rushdie, the world of novel writing has given birth to many celebrities. Novel writing is a time-taking process and requires a lot of patience and struggle.
There is always an inevitable demand for gripping stories and tales, and this is undoubtedly a lucrative career choice and worth the bargain.
Journalist:
Writers who expose lies and propaganda and acquaint the world with world events are always in high demand. Journalism is an indispensable part of civil society as news is part and parcel of daily life.
Attractive pay packages, fulfilling experiences, fame, and adventure potential make this a highly sought-after field.
Screenwriter:
With the rise and growth of cinema, the demand for a good screenwriter is always on the rise. The screenwriter is the creator of a film plot, and it has become one of the most highly paid professions for writers.
Advertising (Creative):
From creating catchy taglines to composing jingles, advertising has many departments for writers. And the best part? The pay scale is high, and the work environment is very exciting.
The pen is a weapon; use it wisely. Let your passion be your future.
Business meetings can make or break your career, and they are very important if you want to expand your ventures and take your organisation to new heights.
They are equally challenging to nail, and certain codes of conduct must be followed to create a lasting impression and improve your networking.
Be punctual:
Time is a limited resource and everyone’s time commitment needs to be valued. Be present for a meeting well before time to make a good impression as this speaks volumes about your work ethic.
Make introductions:
Introduce everyone in a decreasing order of hierarchy to enable better interaction in a meeting. This will highlight your presence at the meeting, and you will be able to bring your communication skills to the fore.
Posture is important:
Sit upright and don’t slouch, as this may reflect on your attitude at work. How you sit for a meeting gives away your level of concentration and seriousness. So an appropriate posture while sitting is imperative.
Be loud enough:
Being soft-spoken is a sign of lesser confidence and an attribute of submissiveness that can work against you. You need to be audible to everyone in the room. Your voice needs to be bold enough so that your listeners get a taste of your self-confidence and leadership skills.
Keep your phone away:
Keep your phones away from the table and put them on silent mode. Having your phones blink or vibrate while they’re on the table is a rude gesture and distracts the people attending the meeting.
Eating rules:
Avoid eating at a meeting as it causes disturbance and creates unnecessary noises. Also, make sure not to leave any used glasses or plates at the table after the meeting. This reflects poorly on your professionalism.
Ask questions well before time:
Don’t ask untimely questions and put in irrelevant comments. Especially at the very end, it can be irritating if someone starts to extend the meeting by asking questions that are not important.
When business, technology, and user experience all come together, they converge into what is known as Product Management.
The job of a Product Manager, deservedly known as the “CEO of the product,” is to discover a beneficial, utilizable, and viable product.
If you are looking to hire somebody who can design and develop a profitable, outstanding, and useful product, then the Product Manager is your guy!
How to Select a Product Manager?
A few things to bear in mind while selecting a suitable candidate for this job are as follows:
• Your candidate should possess a solid knowledge of engineering concepts.
• They should discuss the essential architecture of a product they have launched effortlessly.
• They should be capable of elaborating on software products they’ve launched previously.
• A suitable candidate will be competent enough to give examples of lessons learned by means of the feedback given by their users.
Product Manager Interview Questions
Listed below are 12 interview questions (operational and situational) to hire the best person for this job:
1. Explain how you would monetize Twitter.
2. Tell me about your process for designing product features in detail.
3. Elucidate a product you have launched previously, as well as your users and competition.
4. Name some products or people who have inspired your method of designing products.
5. Elaborate on how you decide on what not to build?
6. You mentioned one feature from the product in your engineer-speak. Describe it.
7. Describe a commercially successful product of your choice. What, according to you, makes it so successful?
8. You’re almost ready to launch your SaaS product. How do you plan to gather feedback?
9. Throw some light on a time when your engineers questioned a decision you made. What was the problem? How would you defend their opinion?
10. Elaborate on your experience with writing product manuals.
11. These are the flaws in our products. What would you do to improve them? Explain step by step.
12. Tell us how you would like to spend your first week on the job?
There you go, now you are all set to recruit new people.
FlexJobs – A website that provides information about flexible careers and professions revealed some of the most flexible jobs out there, which will see a huge demand this year.
I have put together a list of 10 such flexible jobs, and they are as follows:
1. Product Managers –
A Product Manager is often known as the CEO of a product. The pre-requisites of becoming a product manager are a bachelor’s degree and years of relevant experience.
A nurse practitioner (NPS) job includes supervising and coordinating patient care while examining, diagnosing, and treating patients. NPS requires a master’s degree and suitable licensing.
3. Financial Analyst –
A financial Analyst is a person who monitors financial trends, sets product prices, reviews budgets while also recommending an economic course of action, such as to buy or sell stocks based on their current strength.
4. Client Services Coordinator –
“Customer is King”; good customer service is critical for building a successful business in any industry. A client services coordinator’s task includes addressing and resolving his clients’ issues.
5. Statistician –
Their role is to conduct extensive research, analyze data, and prepare reports for a slew of clients and fields. You need a master’s degree, related experience, and sometimes, a PhD to become a Statistician.
6. Physical Therapy Assistant –
They are required to work under the guidance of a physical therapist, oversee prescribed therapies, provide care, and reach out to patients.
Typically, you will need an associate’s degree in physical therapy assistance and current licensing to become one of them.
7. Operations Manager –
The Operations Manager is hired to plan, help function, and direct companies. They work jointly with the accounting, marketing, sales, and IT departments.
8. Office Manager –
An office manager’s role is to ensure that the office runs smoothly. They also manage support staff, make travel arrangements, manage office supplies.
9. Genetic Counselor –
Genetic counsellors typically work in healthcare clinics. Their job includes preparing cases, collecting histories, and conducting risk assessments.
10. Business Development –
This requires the creation of long-term value for a company. They are responsible for identifying sales opportunities and expanding the business.
So, these were the top 10 most flexible jobs.
Now let’s take a look at the most stressful jobs
10 Most Stressful Jobs in 2017
Distress at the workplace is caused by many factors such as – unreasonable deadlines, excessive workload, erratic schedules, unfair wages, uncooperative colleagues. This often leads to emotional turmoil and physical illnesses, setting a person up for early burnout.
However, specific jobs are stressful beyond the normal levels. CareerCast published an article earlier this year, revealing the ten most stressful jobs considering factors like the risk of injury or death, working conditions, deadlines, competition.
Some jobs on this list might come as a surprise since they are often judged glamorous at face value. Here’s the list –
Firefighters risk their lives to save property and people from destruction every time they put on their suits.
2. Military Personnel –
CareerCast emphasized that careers in the U.S. Navy Seal or U.S. Army expose candidates to a high risk of physical harm to oneself or another, for which no one else would be responsible.
Pilots are responsible for hundreds of lives on board. Can you imagine the amount of work pressure they endure every single day of their lives?
No wonder it’s one of the highest paying jobs!
4. Taxi Drivers –
Have you ever yelled at an Uber driver for being late? Try to think about what they go through an entire day at work with hot-headed customers like us.
Also, the traffic and time pressure only adds to all the stress.
5. Event Organizer –
Organizing a festival may seem very exciting, but one flaw in the execution and you’ll know what it’s like to face the wrath of an A-list celebrity.
It’s certainly not all that glamorous.
6. News Reporter –
A journalist is required to work under tremendous time pressure and sometimes even go to the crime scene or war-torn areas to cover a story.
CareerCast stated that some agencies pay writers based on how many clicks their articles receive. This only adds to their stress.
They may possess a great degree of power and authority, but that’s nothing compared to the stress they go through owing to the dangers involved in their job.
8. Corporate Executive –
The CEO is responsible for the firm’s operations and sometimes has to bear the brunt of the board of directors. That can’t be easy!
9. Public Relations Officer –
Working under public scrutiny while adhering to strict deadlines makes this a highly taxing job.
10. Broadcaster –
According to a recent press release, there has been a downslide in their job outlook by nine per cent this year. Furthermore, like a news reporter, broadcasters have to work around deadlines, and there’s also a risk of being bashed with a lawsuit.
Geology is defined as the study of various natural processes and changes that occur over the planet’s terrain as a whole.
In the wake of environmental disasters and also a global energy crisis, all of us need to become more aware of the consequences.
When coupled with the widespread degradation of land and water due to population explosion, industrial processes, excessive fossil fuel usage and mineral ore mining, the relevance of geologists today has multiplied.
Here are the top 5 vocations a person interested in geology can opt for.
Geological Education:
If you love teaching children and impacting young minds, then you can create awareness about the natural sciences by teaching at the middle and high school levels.
Being a college or university professor requires a PhD at most institutions.
Engineering Geology:
These geologists work in conjunction with engineers and other professionals to monitor the planning and construction of buildings, roads, dams and tunnels.
Their main role is to assess the strength of a particular land drove construction material and figure out how much stress it can take. They also have expertise in rock strength, the stability of slopes, and soils mechanics.
Environmental Geology:
These professionals assess the impact of industrial processes on the environment by carrying out water and soil tests. Then they proceed to the remediation of ground and river water.
They also examine sites for their pollution magnitude to clean toxic chemicals from the water and the soil.
Field Geology:
This field requires extensive monitoring, construction of maps and charts and many field trips to assess various parameters of the Earth’s terrain and help experts find deductions and solutions to the environmental problems.
Petroleum Geology and Economic Geology:
Expertise in geology can be utilised to mitigate the world energy crisis and yield economic benefits. You will extract Earth’s resources- including ore minerals, oil, natural gas and coal- to use them for financial benefits.
The field of surgery is the most rewarding yet demanding profession in the medical industry. General surgeons must have a lot of expertise and multidisciplinary skills to make it big in their profession.
Even a discrepancy of a nanometre can prove to be fatal makes it even more necessary to possess a skill set that sets the surgeon apart from other specialties.
Here are the skills you will require to be a good surgeon.
Good motor skills
To ace any career, you need to have the perfect hand-eye coordination, manual dexterity, and attention to detail. Still, these qualities are indispensable for a surgeon as they are involved in technique sensitive yet extremely vital tasks like severing blood vessels, excising tumours, or suturing wounds.
Your hand needs to work steadily, even under pressure.
Teamwork
Although a surgeon performs the surgery, they can’t accomplish their tasks without assistants, nurses, anesthesiologists and other professionals.
A surgeon needs to value all these people to play a vital part in successful surgery. A surgeon needs to work in harmony with other units of the medical fraternity to make a surgery successful.
Communication skills
As mentioned before, surgeons can’t perform a successful surgery without attaining perfect harmony with the auxiliary and other doctors on the team. Effective communication skills help in smooth operations with professionalism and calm.
Problem-solving
Often, surgeons are met with complications during surgeries that can be life-threatening at many times. And navigating this situation requires a lot of restraint and problem-solving abilities, as lack of this can put the patient’s life at risk.
Patience and stamina
Surgeries can be gruelling at times, especially with complicated conditions and diseases. Sometimes surgeries can last for almost half a day, in many cases, more than that.
So surgeons require a lot of patience and physical and mental stamina to complete these surgical procedures successfully. Focus and calm are extremely important.
So, if you wish to be a surgeon, are on the way to become one, make sure you have these skills.
Health insurance is a prized possession today. With policy changes being implemented in the US and costly healthcare services, it is always good to look for a job that gives you decent health insurance coverage.
Here are a few companies that offer great health benefits to their employers.
1. Whole Foods:
This is a food-manufacturing company in Austin, and it is the largest supplier of natural and organic foods. It remunerates its workers with an hourly wage of 19 dollars.
The health plan for Whole Foods employees is a full medical, dental and vision package that is not bound by a contract. The minimum deductible amount is 1500 dollars for employees on a 20-hour per week regime.
2. Allegis Group:
This is a staffing and consultancy firm and has around 10000 full-time workers who have a 20 hour per week regime.
Given full medical, dental and vision coverage, insurance covers are also provided for the families of the employees and provisions are made for temporary workers too.
The company also provides health savings accounts where deposits are made as per the wishes of the company management.
3. Costco:
This is a retail firm which is the 2nd largest in the USA and has around 650 stores and has around 18500 employees on board. This company, apart from paying a decent 21 dollars per hour to its workers, has 88% of its employees on health insurance.
The health plan for Costco called a Choice Plus Health Plan had given the members the discretion to choose their providers. It also has an in-house pharmacy, prescription plan, and a low-cost dental insurance cover for part-timers.
4. Lowe’s:
Lowe is a home improvement firm with outlets all over the world. It has 160000 employees on its payroll. The Health plan consists of limited medical insurance for medical checkups and consultancy and basic dental and vision coverage.
After paying 100% for the first year of the insurance, a 60% cover is provided subsequently.
Starbucks is a worldwide coffee and food chain with over 16000 branches in the US alone. It has around 2,00,000 workers on its payroll.
The company is known to treat its workers very nicely, offering them annual pay packages of around 35000 dollars and a comprehensive benefits package too.
The health plans cover 100 per cent of medical consultations and checkups. They also cover 70% of the treatment expenses and many alternative health services like chiropractors and acupuncture.
Dental plans include basic procedures and checkups.
Just being passionate about sports can’t equal the calibre required for surviving in the field. Some people fond of sports may not be physically fit enough or not inclined to be a part of sports on the field.
One requires the perfect combination of stamina, skills, and talent to succeed.
But if your passion for sports is still undying, you can choose from the following off-field occupations to be associated with sports while earning handsomely in the bargain.
Taking care of the health needs of sports-persons is a part of the job. Sports players are highly prone to muscle injuries and sprains, so physiologists and wellness professionals are highly demanded.
The pay package is excellent too, and you can be up close and personal with your favourite sports personalities. You can also be a part of research facilities for sports aiming at health and testing practices.
Sports Dietitians:
Diet is an integral part of every sportsperson’s routine. Sports-persons must maintain specific body weight and muscle mass for their respective fields, and a sports dietitian helps them achieve that form.
Trainers:
If you can’t be on the field, you can always show them how it’s done. Many sportspersons who have quit the field or have an infirmity that prevents them from playing can train future players to win medals for their country.
It is a highly-fulfilling and rewarding profession.
This is the most glamorous and high-paying field for sports enthusiasts. From being a sports presenter to a columnist or a photojournalist, you can work for big organisations and be in the limelight while spending time with all the celebrated persons in the sports field.
If you are someone who loves sports, but and wants to be closely associated with the field, you can try out these career options.
While the honour of wearing the white coat and saving a thousand lives is a privilege in itself, the entire process to become a doctor is that of hard work, relentless struggle, and toil.
This may burn out a lot of us, and it’s natural. But to make it through, medical students have to hold themselves together and make sure that stress doesn’t get the better of them.
Though the pressure in medical studies is intense, most people will emerge with shining colours.
So go through these 5 tips that will help you cope with the stress of a medical course.
Breathe:
You need to calm down and understand that you’re not alone. Your batch-mates are undergoing the same pressure, and your seniors went through it previously and made it!
The calmer you are, the better you perform. So ease up and don’t overthink.
Cut yourself some slack:
Medical students are known to be highly stressed. Take a breather for a while. Go on that trip, chat with your buddies, watch that movie- whatever helps you relax, but not at the cost of your studies.
Take sensible breaks from your study schedule. This is important.
Manage your written work at the beginning itself:
Most students leave their practical and file work for the end of the term. But last moment, panic can mess with your head and interfere with exam preparation.
Avoid procrastination. You may have fun at the beginning of the term, but this very backlog can haunt you afterwards. So make sure that all your files are completed by mid-session.
Study in increments:
Most toppers will tell you they studied for the entire year. Consistency is key. If you cover the essential topics during the entire year, you’ll have good command when exams arrive by the end of the session.
This will also reduce your study load and exam stress while your concepts will be crystal clear.
Focus on the basics:
Subjects like Anatomy and Physiology can be very typical and volatile. You will find it hard to grasp them if you mug it all up.
So it’s better to delve into the depth and origin of these concepts and focus more on visual and audio-visual learning so that everything is at your fingertips as you can understand the basics better.
If you are a medico student, do try these tips, they will surely help.
