A robotics engineering degree opens the door to diverse spread of opportunities. Any field that involves the planning, construction and/or maintenance of technological solutions has room for a robotics engineering degree holder. With this degree, tasks that you're qualified for can range from drafting conceptual blueprints to testing technology that's already been developed. The following are just a few examples of some of the careers that can be broken into if you have a robotics engineering degree.
Controls Engineer
A robotics engineering degree can qualify you as dependable enough to be entrusted with automated control system management. Modern manufacturers use all kinds of automated machinery solutions to streamline their workflow, and they need professionals who can be counted on to keep these automated solutions fully operational by controlling for the chance of errors.
As a controls engineer, you'll ensure that automated machinery solutions are optimized to perform their tasks in the exact manner that they're intended. The specific types of industries that you'll find the most demand for your services as a controls engineer will mostly be food plant factories and car manufacturing factories.
Controls engineers make sure that consumer product manufacturing practices are kept up to their ideal standard. The baseline for manufacturing standard quality that you'll be asked to maintain as a controls engineer will contextually depend on the industry in question, so it pays to become well-versed in exactly what the manufacturing demands of a given industry are before seeking work in it.
Development Engineer
As a development engineer, you'll be tasked with making sure that a company's technical solution development plans fit the ideal vision for the end product. Your biggest challenge will be to make sure that all aspects of product development fall in line with the manufacturing, sales and marketing departments' goals. Striking a balance between the initiatives of all departments necessitates not only good engineering skills, but high-quality communication skills as well.
You'll likely be looked to as a supervisory figure who shares their insight with key personnel in the design and research sectors. Once the marketing, manufacturing and sales teams' initiatives have each been clearly established, you can work to ensure that the subsequent product drafts and testing procedures align with said initiatives.
Robotics Engineer
As a robotics engineer, you will be involved in more than just the process of physically manufacturing robots. To make sure that the core directives of robotics engineering projects are honored on every level, you'll be asked to supervise everything from the initial blueprinting phase to the final pre-launch test runs. The most important challenge that you'll have as a robotics engineer is to strike the right balance between cost-efficiency, safety and productivity in the final robotic model.
Related Resource: 30 Most Affordable Online Master's in Marketing Degrees
Job Outlook
The Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies robotics engineers as electromechanical technicians with a median annual salary of of about $55,610. In 2014, there were approximately 14,700 jobs in the field. The projected job growth rate for robotics engineering and related fields by 2024 is 4 percent, fairly slower than average. Because the entry barrier for the field is high in its demand for technical skills, the number of jobs in it isn't expected to change by any more than few hundred within the next seven years.