Eventual job dissatisfaction in engineers

[Jeff Ford]

I'm on my way back to school and am drawn towards engineering. I've read about engineering being a field with high job satisfaction, and it contains a lot of the elements I value in a job.

Recently I read that approximately 25% of engineers leave the fields between 5-10 years after entering it. This was explained as being due to the engineers moving from design work into management work, feeling like they were no longer connected with the projects, and feeling like the work at that level wasn't related to the work they had enjoyed at lower levels.

This concerns me a bit. I'll be investing quite a bit of time and money to return to school for a degree that I would only find satisfying for 5-10 years. Have any engineers on the board had experience with this?

Thanks
Jeff

 

[chroot]

Jeff,

People change careers an average of three times throughout their lives. The fact that 25% of engineers change careers within 5-10 years does not seem all that significant, since that seems roughly equal to what I'd expect for any profession. To put the numbers in context, can you compare them to the numbers for other professions?

- Warren