Optical Engineers: Career Info & Job Prospects

[denjay]

So my Google skills must be getting rusty because I can't find any good information on what Optical Engineers exactly do. I've narrowed it down to design optical systems.. and that's about it. I don't know the job prospects (are they in demand? are they too niche?). I don't really know what they're all about other than learning about and manipulating light to do things we want them to do.

Assuming I'm not growing more incompetent with searches, does anyone have any personal experience with the field or any knowledge about the career beside the basic summaries on the optical societies' webpages?

 

[Andy Resnick]

Optical engineering covers a broad range of activities from systems design (from source to detector) through assembly, testing, and validation. Systems span a broad range, including imaging and nonimaging, and cover the entire E&M spectrum.

Like any other profession, your career prospects depend more on your particular skills, interests and ability than on a coarse-grained measure like 'employer demand'.

 

[reasonableman]

I concur with Andy, it is a wide ranging field.

I also suspect that a lot of the people in Optical Engineering probably have varied backgrounds (e.g. signal processing engineers through to photonics PhD students) and may not define themselves as an 'optical engineer', similarly their bosses do not either and don't put it on the vacancy...