Career Prospects of Industrial Engineering

Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System once said, “Companies that are not adequately engaged in industrial engineering are like houses built on sand. At Toyota we have a saying: IE makes money”.

This sums up the importance of industrial engineering in today’s increasingly competitive world market. An industrial engineer is basically a systems integrator – a big-picture thinker. One should not misinterpret the term “industrial” here and assume that the work is just limited to manufacturing, though traditionally a major aspect of industrial engineering was planning the layouts of factories and designing assembly lines and other manufacturing paradigms. But now it covers a wide and varied range of industries from FMCG, IT & system, consultancy, banking & financial institutions to telecom. Now industrial engineers work to eliminate wastage of time, money, materials, energy and other resources.

Job Options

• Business systems analyst
• Business process engineer
• Production, process, assets or manufacturing engineer
• Quality control manager
• Health and safety manager
• Human resource manager
• Logistics manager or facilities engineer
• Project manager
• Plant supervisor
• Scheduling and planning manager
• Operations manager
• Management consultant

Due to the all-encompassing nature of this discipline, an industrial engineer can get employed in almost any industry. Lean manufacturing is required in every possible industry and hence industrial engineers have to step in. They can also provide consulting to companies, working as specialists after enough number of years in the industry. Industrial engineers also have the option of joining private consultancy firms, R&D establishments of big companies or work with all types of engineering and manufacturing industries in both the private and public sectors. Often, within a few years at a company, industrial engineers will become strong candidates for technical supervisory or engineering management positions because their work is more related to management than most other engineering disciplines. Industrial engineers work across a wide area of applications: management science, financial engineering, engineering management, supply chain management, process engineering, operations research, systems engineering, ergonomics, cost and value engineering, quality engineering, facilities planning and the engineering design process.

Most industrial engineers have good working conditions, intellectually challenging work, and a high level of satisfaction. Hours can be long, but this tends to be outweighed by the satisfaction derived from the education that each different project brings.