<p>So at this point I'm 100% certain that I want to pursue a career in sales engineering, but I'm uncertain as to which engineering field will have the best opportunities. Right now I've narrowed my interests to mainly civil/environmental and biochemical engineering, but have no idea which field is more realistic to pursue with going into marketing/sales in mind. As far as personal interest goes, I find environmental engineering just a tad bit more interesting than biochemical, but if biochem (or any other engineering discipline for that matter) has better opportunity for the future I would have no issue pursuing it. </p>
<p>So I guess the short question is: With becoming a sales engineer in mind, which engineering discipline would it be best to pursue?</p>
<p>I’ve never heard of someone just starting college wanting to be a sales engineer. Why is that exactly?</p>
<p>I think your best bets will be Industrial and Systems Engineering or Computer Science</p>
<p>Dre, I think what he means by sales engineer is someone who sells engineering products and needs to understand the technology enough to be able to answer customers’ questions about it intelligently. In that case, he could really major in anything because all engineering firms sell something (whether it’s software, mechanical devices, services, etc). </p>
<p>The reason I ask why you want to be a sales engineer is because it’s really necessary to answer your question. If you want to do it because you want to have a lot of social interaction in your job, you certainly don’t need to go into sales - you could do industrial engineering which involves a lot of teamwork and interaction with all sorts of people in an organization, or you could major in any other area of engineering and look for a job with a company that involves more teamwork than others. If you really want to do sales specifically, then it would be a good idea instead to major in something broad like mechanical, chemical, biomedical, etc because technical expertise will be more important. In that case, industrial engineering probably wouldn’t be the way to go, since industrial engineers produce a lot more services than products.</p>
<p>I think electrical engineering is the best for this. Even other forms of engineering need to buy instrumentation.</p>
<p>If you want to sell BME equipment, you can major in BME or ME…but why waste time doing BME (jack of all trade) just for sake of selling the equipment?..Anyhow, I know some sales engineers and you can major in anything Eng as long as you are not afraid of talking and have the sales personality then the job is yours. </p>
<p>I suggest IF you want to be a sales pro…then after ENG, you go take MBA, concentration in Marketing or general MBA. That’s the route you need to take.</p>
<p>Also if you want to go specifically to sales with just your Bachelors, then minor in Business as well.</p>
<p>First of all, I just realized I made a stupid minor error: I meant to say bioMEDical not biochemical, not that it changes your answers much. </p>
<p>Kamel: I’m not interested in sales engineering just for the social interaction. I can’t really describe what exactly makes the job so attractive to me, but I guess I really like the thought of being able to combine my math and science skills with my more competitive and charismatic business characteristics. Knowing a complex product really well and then convincing people to buy and use it just sounds really great to me, haha. Plus, even on business, I’m not one to complain about being paid to travel. </p>
<p>Jan: Yeah, I was thinking I would definitely be getting some sort of business-related education in addition to the engineering. So would you say getting an MBA would be my best option? Would I need any work experience or could I go ahead and get it right after undergrad? </p>
<p>Also, a cousin of mine is a successful sales engineer, now global marketing director for a healthcare company in California, and I know she got her master’s in [Healthcare</a> Technologies Management](<a href=“http://www.marquette.edu/engineering/hctm/why.shtml]Healthcare”>http://www.marquette.edu/engineering/hctm/why.shtml) from Marquette. If I decided to go into biomed., do you think taking that program would be a valid option as well or would you still go MBA or something else?</p>
<p>Honestly, it’s unusual for anyone to aim for that specific interest at this point in their career. There are so many other ways you can combine a competitive and charismatic personality with your math and science interests. Most obviously: start a business! </p>
<p>There is no cookie cutter path to a career like your cousin’s. Study what you’re interested right now, do well, and worry about the very specific career you are hoping to pursue when the time comes. Very few people end up going in the same direction they imagined as freshmen (and far fewer who had such specific career interests). Look, I’m sure you admire your cousin, but you can definitely have an awesome career that utilizes the same personality traits and skill sets doing something completely different. Your cousin just happens to be the only real-life example you have right now. I really doubt your cousin planned on being a global marketing director or a sales engineer when she was a freshman.</p>
<p>A good sales engineer can earn more money several years into the job than most engineers make at any time in their career! It’s a great job if you can understand more complicated products/concepts and also enjoy the human interaction and are competitive by nature. A typical path to sales engineer is to become an application engineer (more like internal sales with some direct support at customers’ locations) for a few year first, however not all go that route. </p>
<p>I know the BioMechanical Engineering sales field is tremendous, not sure about environmental - it could also be, I just don’t know. Also, many business owners started their career in sales. An MBA might be helpful, but the truth is, if you can sell successfully and stay connected you can write your own ticket. It’s NOT easy, but can be a great job/career. No punching a clock, work hard but some flexibility in schedule, trips, new projects all the time, new people to see. Someone who fears rejection can’t sell, but it sounds like that’s not you so i say go for it. </p>
<p>Do you have to decide now? Of course not… but do some more research into the fields that interest you and take your time deciding. As was said, most companies hiring for sales engineering positions really want any engineer that can sell. Some need a specific type, maybe the biomechanical type of products, but many do not.</p>
<p>The bottom line is this: what do you want to sell? Sales engineers sell products with which they are familiar. That’s the whole point. So if you want to sell electronic components, do EE. If you want to sell machines/machine parts, do ME. Continue along those lines for other products. There is, of course, some crossover as well.</p>
<p>I’ve recently been offered and accepted a job at a major technology company that sells software and computer hardware (servers, power systems, and mainframes). At this particular company, they bring in sales engineers with a variety of educational backgrounds and give them the necessary product training (1 year of training). In fact, most of the people who interviewed me were not engineering majors at all. A majority majored in other STEM majors (chemistry, math, and even oceanography). I believe their philosophy is that they don’t expect you to be an expert in a certain field; rather, they look to see if you are competent enough to excel in a technical role and will then train you to get you to a level of expertise.</p>
<p>I hope to work in a sales engineering role, as well. The money is a motivating factor</p>
<p>Certainly, the money is very enticing, and part of it is from commission. Often the salary amounts to around 100k-160k a year, I believe.</p>
I would say EE or CS are safe bets. Most technologies these days are using electrical knowledge in one way or another. I studied MechE and wish, to some extend, that I studied EE or CS. It really is the future of tech. However, it is still very possible to get an SE job with other engineering degrees (like me). If you’re still interested, https://moderntechsales.com is exclusively for Sales Engineers.
-Ry
Current Sales Engineer (degree in MechE)
I know this thread has been dead for a while. However, since it is alive now, I would say: if you just start college in engineering and want to be professional Sales Engineer then while in college, please take elective classes in Marketing. I think those classes are Marketing 301, etc.
Why be a sales engineer? My dad is a recruiter and he constantly sees sales/pre-sales engineers making 200k 5 years out of college not including stock options
That’s absolutely not par for the course to be making that. Going back to an earlier discussion of outliers…
Lets make America Great Again by not forgetting or ignoring the Outliers not matter how small they are. Like small pieces of nuts and bolts, they are also part of that big engine/equipment. If we start ignoring marketing classes to be used for sales engineer and only concentrate on engineering classes, you will not be successful sales engineer. You need to utilze also the tools in sales aka marketing classes. I hope this message will resonate to you and any sales engineers out there. Lets make Sales Engineer job great again by not forgetting the small tools (marketing classes available to be used).
I am sorry but you honestly have no idea what you are talking about.
[ol]
[li]No one has ever said that outliers don’t matter. What we have been saying to you time and again is that you cannot point to outliers as a means of illustrating the outcome for a typical case. A typical engineering student will have an average outcome, not a sustantially above or below average one.[/li]
[li]Marketing courses have very little to do with sales engineers’ day to day jobs, and is really unnecessary for getting into sales. Marketing is generally handled by a company’s marketing department. The sales engineers instead need a broad technical understanding of the product so that they can (a) advise the marketing team and (b) advise the customers, who will generally be requiring answers to very technical questions when deciding what to buy.[/li]
[li]I don’t know why you feel “make ____ great again” has anything to do with any of the discussions where you have been repeatedly posting it today.[/li][/ol]