Career Opportunities as an IE

Plenty of need, plenty of opportunity.

As you consider a career in industrial and systems engineering, it’s logical that one of the first things you’d want to know is whether it’s a growing field.

The answer is an unqualified “yes.”

With over 201,000 employed as industrial engineers in 2006, we are the third largest specialty in engineering, following Civil and Mechanical, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Industrial engineers are expected to have employment growth of 20 percent over the next decade, faster than the average for all occupations. As firms look for new ways to reduce costs and raise productivity, they increasingly will turn to industrial engineers to develop more efficient processes and reduce costs, delays, and waste. This should lead to job growth for these engineers, even in manufacturing industries with slowly growing or declining employment overall. Because their work is similar to that done in management occupations, many industrial engineers leave the occupation to become managers. Many openings will be created by the need to replace industrial engineers who transfer to other occupations or leave the labor force.

Put simply, ISE graduates solve problems, and there’s never a shortage of those!

The sky’s not the limit.

A career in industrial and systems engineering (ISE) is all about variety. While most other engineering disciplines apply skills to very specific areas, a career in ISE gives you the flexibility and opportunity to work in a wide array of businesses and fields.

Consider just a few examples of where you might go in your industrial and systems engineering career:

1. As a customer service engineer for a local telephone company, you may develop a supplier quality program, or work to improve customer satisfaction by designing a process to schedule service calls more effectively and in a more consumer-friendly way.
2. As a management systems engineer in a hospital, you may design admissions procedures to ensure efficient patient admission, or you may design procedures for optimum use of medical facilities to help bring the cost of healthcare down.
3. As an ergonomist in an automobile manufacturing plant, you may change the tools workers use to assemble steering mechanisms in order to reduce the risk of repetitive stress injuries.
4. As an operations engineer for a parcel service, you may design a conceptual layout of a service and maintenance facility for aircraft, or improve operations to reduce the time and improve the accuracy in transporting items for shipment from the terminal to the aircraft.

It’s also important to note that while manufacturing firms and service industries still lead the way in hiring significant numbers of industrial and systems engineers, more and more businesses are hiring them in areas like sales and marketing, finance, logistics, information systems, and human resources

More detailed information on ISE careers (pdf)