Online Programs in Engineering Management
Engineering managers direct, coordinate, and plan research, production, and design activities. With support personnel, they often supervise technicians, scientists, and other engineers. An engineer manager requires strong communication and technical skills as they oversee a diverseness of activities that are team based. Along with the responsibility of managing jobs and people, engineering managers determine technical and scientific goals inside the liberal outlines that top executives provide to them. Some of these many goals could include formulating new products, furthering scientific research, or improving manufacturing operations.
Engineering managers must formulate, develop and design detailed project and business plans in order to achieve their goals. To be an effective engineering manager requires him or her to be knowledgeable in administrative functions such as supervision, hiring, and budgeting. Part of their responsibility is to propose the program or projects budgets and regulate the staff, equipment, and training required. On each project, they hire and assign support personnel, engineers, scientists, or others to work on required specific jobs, along with supervising their work and reviewing the personnel's output. The engineering manager institutes the administrative policies and procedures, including things such as environmental standards.
They also require strong technical knowledge, work experience, engineering certification, formal education, and exceptional communication skills. Engineering managers must possess the ability to guide their personnel's work and communicate with both potential customers and senior management in non-technical or technical terms they understand. Most engineering managers have obtained an engineering management master's degree, business administration master's degree or both. Employers seeking an engineering manager look for engineers with strong communication and administrative skills in addition to exceptional technical knowledge in their field.
They expect the job outlook of engineering managers to remain favorable and their employment to continue to grow at an average pace for the next seven years. This is in line with the employment growth projected for most sciences and engineering positions. They will be several additional job openings created as engineer managers reach retirement age, change occupations or accept higher positions. Professionals that possess strong communication skills, experience, business management skills, and advanced technical knowledge have the best chance of obtaining an engineering management position. A large number of engineering managers work in the rapidly growing engineering areas such as biomedical and environmental engineering while others work in management services for technical, scientific, and management consulting firms. Some accept employment in areas that are a little slower growing such as aerospace and nuclear engineering.