The Engineering Branch Mistake Everyone Makes

Key Takeaways

Thousands of students destroy their engineering careers by selecting the wrong branch. If you are a student who is preparing for engineering in your class 11th or 12th, you must have heard about these opinions. Computer science safest option mechanical engineering scope civil engineering scope. Everyone has an opinion. When I cracked BTE in NIT Dapur from chemical engineering, I was the first engineering graduate from my family and I too fell for a similar opinion. chemical engineering advanced chemistry. Trust me that one single decision changed the way my entire four years in college went by. The real question is not industry is branch scope. It is in fact how does life look like in a particular branch which you choose for your careers because a branch is not where you just study about subjects. A branch is where you understand okay these are the 10 different problems which you will be solving in the next 10 to 20 years of your life. So choosing a branch is extremely important. So in this video we will be breaking down the top five branches in the industry and how the life of an engineer looks like in each of these branches. Before we deep dive into the top five branches let's try to understand some numbers. In India every year there are 2.5 lakh jobs created for entry-level engineers every year. And out of these 2.5 lakh jobs two lakh jobs are for engineers in the field of computer science and technology. The remaining 50,000 odd jobs are concentrated in fields like mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, electronics engineering, civil engineering and then other engineering fields as well. Let's try to understand each of these departments in depth. So yes, software engineering dominates the land of engineering jobs. But every branch creates a different engineer. Let's try to understand how. Let's start with computer science engineering. In the morning, you open your laptop. Your team has assigned you a new feature to be built. Someday maybe you're shipping code to build a payment system. Someday you're trying to debug why an app is crashing for some users. Someday you are trying to build an entire architecture or a system of an application. And sometimes what is happening is you're trying to find out that one bug which is there in thousands of lines of code and sometimes you build something that millions of people use. This is the kind of impact which students at computer science engineering are able to drive at scale. And in the world of AI and technology, this is just going to grow uh multiple folds. If you as a student are someone who loves the thought about coding, solving real life problems with logic and loves to have long hours of sitting with their laptops, has a comfort of working with laptops, then yes, software and computer science engineering these are the lines where you should be focusing as an individual and that's one reason why it accounts for majority of jobs today. Now let's try to understand one question which most of the students have always come back to me and asked sir in the world of AI are the number of jobs in the market going to come down because AI is going to replace humans in the job I have done a research over here so that I can get you the answer to this question answer is very straightforward let's try to understand a little bit deeper about how the jobs in computer science engineering look like so there are two kinds of jobs the first kind of job is what you call as the serviceoriented job roles these job roles account for about 80% of the two lakh jobs in computer science engineering. That's roughly about 1 lakh 60,000 jobs. And on the other side, there is a product engineering job opportunity which is the most premium of the opportunities in computer science field and would be about 40,000 odd jobs as of today. Now, if you look at the serviceoriented roles, serviceoriented roles are typically job roles where you do typical maintenance and support work for your clients who have built products and just require you to ensure that nothing breaks in the process. Whereas in the field of product engineering, what you would be seeing is students are actually building innovative creative products by the usage of first principle thinking and design systems which are able to work for millions of users solving a real life problem. This as a field product engineering is where real skill sets are required where your creativity shines and as intellectual students more and more jobs in this field are going to come in the next 5 years. Service roles on the other hand are very much procedure oriented jobs and that's exactly why AI agents are today replacing jobs replacing humans in the field of serviceoriented jobs but in product oriented jobs I'm not seeing this kind of shift which is happening with AI because a lot of creativity and ingenuity is used from the students end from the product engineers end and therefore you are seeing that these jobs are going to grow in the future in fact I wouldn't be surprised if from today's 40,000 odd jobs this job becomes more than one lakh in the future. In fact, in this market, what I have seen is there is a lack of right skill sets. What is happening today is that the CEO of Google, Microsoft, Adobe, they are all coming out and saying that in the era of AI, they are actually requiring more skilled engineers than ever before. But today, the fact of the matter, in fact, the sadness over here is that there aren't as many skilled engineers as required in the market. How can you become a skilled engineer who is relevant in this market? The answer is very simple. You should be focusing on building industry first to relevance. Number one, you need to look at more projects which help you learn by doing instead of reading books. Number two, you need to look at internships. Number three, you need to focus on participating in as many competitions as you can which gets your skill sets recognized in the national or global level. That's how real outcomes are created. In fact, around this concept, some of the engineering institutions are also building groundbreaking outcomes. For example, at Scalis School of Technology, students right from year 1 are working with frontier LLM companies on projects and building groundbreaking technology with startups in the field of IoT, blockchain, AI, and robotics. Along with this, you're also looking at student entrepreneurs growing out from these kind of campuses where they're getting the right ecosystem, the right mentorship, funding opportunities and at the end they are getting an entire avenue where they can experiment and build with artificial intelligence. This produces industry first outcomes and it is why some of the fastest growing companies trust SST with AI first industry relevant engineers to hire for their companies. Now let's understand the field of electrical engineering. Instead of building apps and products, what you are trying to solve for is deciding how power flows through transmission lines. You're trying to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy by the usage of turbines. You're understanding the mechanics of motor and sometimes even figuring out, okay, if a motor is getting overheated, how do you kind of control the temperature? If you are an electrical engineer, you're very likely to work in the fields of electric vehicles, semiconductors, and power plants in the lines of transmissions. If you love physics, if you love to build circuits, if you are interested in the foray of renewable energy or love the idea of having electricity transmitted across cities and factories, then I think electrical engineering is something which is very very relevant for you. Now let's try to understand a little bit about electronics engineering. Electronics engineering as a subject is actually carved out from electrical engineering. If electrical engineering on one side talks about large amounts of electricity, think about thousands to laks of volts which are running through your turbines, motors and so on. Electronics engineering however focuses on controlling small amounts of electricity to transmit signals and information. If you are an electronics engineer, then you are very well going to build circuits which are going to be in embedded systems, microcontrollers and some of the smallest hardware units which go behind everyday products that we use. Things like mobile phones, laptops have electronics engineers working at the back end to help you get that seamless experience using the devices. A lot of communication systems are also built with the help of electronics engineers. In fact, in future, what you would be seeing is jobs are going to grow in the fields of semiconductors, robotics and automation. So, if you are a student who loves to design circuits, who loves to build uh and work with machines, hardware, and finally, you are also someone who has some bit of coding flare, then electronics engineering can be a good area for you to venture into. Now, let's look at mechanical engineering. Mechanical engineers are actually building machines that make industries work. If you are a mechanical engineer, very likely that you would probably end up making maybe a component of an electric vehicle or maybe you are building the futuristic robots uh in robotics labs or otherwise you are also part of a lot of industries in building their supply chain from the back end. So if you are a student who enjoys machines, who enjoys physics and you love to understand how the physical systems work in day-to-day life, mechanical engineering can be something which is a very interesting option for you. Now let's look at civil engineering. Civil engineers are actually people who make big constructions go live. You're looking at buildings, bridges, large cities. Entire development is taken care by civil engineers. So either you are designing buildings as a civil engineer or you are someone who is supervising how the construction of your designs are actually happening in the world. So this is what a civil engineer's life looks like. If you are someone who loves to design or manage the entire development of large cities, buildings, then this field is something which you should explore as a student. So to summarize, today there are 2.5 lakh jobs which are created in the market every year for entry- level engineers. About two lakh jobs or 80% of them are in the field of computer science engineering and then there are 20% jobs or roughly 40 to 50 odd thousand jobs which are in the fields of core engineering like mechanical, electrical, electronics, civil engineering and others. We discussed the life of engineers in most of the major departments and also demystified whether AI will be able to take away your jobs or not in the field of computer science engineering. And when you're choosing an engineering branch, don't just ask yourself this question, which branch has the best placements. Rather ask yourself, what problems do I want to actually work on in the next 10 to 20 years of my life? Is it software, energy systems, machines, electronics or infrastructure? Because the right branch is the one where the daily work actually excites you. And if you're curious about engineering programs that focus on building real world technology products right at the beginning of your careers, then you can explore programs like we offer at Scala School of Technology. Link is in the description if you want to learn