Getting into an exciting and engaging career is what many people dream of and there are many out there for the taking if you take the right direction in life, with one such route leading to a job in aerospace.
Those with an engineering background have a great opportunity to work in a whole range of industries, including automotive, food manufacturing and field service maintenance. However, getting an aerospace engineering job allows for the chance to get involved on some vast and stimulating projects.

Education
For those still in education and dreaming of working as an aerospace engineer, then you need to be looking towards subjects such as physics, electronics and computers. The earlier you can get involved with such areas the better, so if you happen to read this and are still at high school age, then you’re in a prime position to get started on working towards a career in aerospace.

For those choosing what to do at degree level, then take a look at specific courses such as aerospace engineering or aeronautics engineering. If you want to be a little more general, however, then you can take up a degree such as electrical engineering as half the people who work in aerospace engineering have an electrical engineering background. A third option is mechanical engineering.

During your degree (or at any time before full-time employment), make sure you get at least some work experience, as it will bode well in the future.

Looking for an aerospace engineering job
If you look for vacancies, you’ll find there are many typical roles within aerospace engineering which include design engineers, fitters and welders, manufacturing engineers and project managers. Technical recruitment can be a tricky area to hunt down the exact job you’re after, especially in the US and UK where the aerospace industry is a massive part of the economy.

Targeting certain jobs will depend mainly on two key points: the area you want to work in and the type of degree you’ve earned. There are roles out there for people who can design, build, guide others or work on specific skills such as navigation and instrumentation. The kind of sector also differs between several areas, including aviation, defence systems and even space exploration, the latter easily the most exciting prospect.

You can even go as detailed as working on certain products, so you might want to just work with instrumentation on helicopters in the defence sector, and that is just one of hundreds of examples.

Typical working conditions
A standard week for aerospace engineers is around 40 hours, but demanding deadlines often push that over 50 hours due to the extra pressure and so those looking to enter into such an industry need to be able to deal with stressful environments. The most typical working environment for an aerospace engineer in an office, but certain situations require them to venture outside to study components on an aircraft or similar and these scenarios may involve testing new equipment or even something as stimulating as live product testing a rocket engine.

This is an article from iNTECH technical recruitment who offer recruitment in a whole host of technical and engineering roles such as food manufacturing jobs, automotive & aerospace engineering jobs.

This is a guest post for TheEmployable