<p>Is it true that IE is a very people-oriented career?</p>
<p>I was drawn to IE because of its broad applications and it deals with planning and optimizing processes/systems. But I'm not a very people-oriented person; I'm quite introverted. From what I read on the net, it deals a lot with the management of people. I know I can't handle that because I've been in group works where I had to be the leader. I get exhausted easily just by giving instructions and administering people's tasks. I want to know if there's some specialty in the field of IE for me that doesn't involve too much people-management.</p>
<p>Well systems really involve a process that is at least helped along by people and the people are where you are going to get a lot of your data from. A couple simple examples:</p>
<p>Manufacturing:
You work for a car manufacturer. There has either been an uptick in defective parts or a decrease in production levels. One of the first things you will be doing is going down to the line (where the guys with boots on are) and talking to them to see if their are any special causes first. You will be forming teams to investigate the process. Analyzing, brainstorming, conducting statistical analysis… but yeah, with people</p>
<p>Supply Chain Design:
Here you don’t have just a production line, but you still have customers (Supply chain analysts and Managers). You will need their input, and your expertise to actually design an optimized system. Yeah, a lot of the work will be creating models, using software and the like, but you will need to get data from the process (that is ran by people).</p>
<p>This is the same in healthcare, service, and operations. Processes are big complex things that sometimes are not even fully understood by one person in the company the process is for. To work on processes you will need to know the process, and to do that you will need to speak with the people that own the process. You don’t have to be their leader, but you do need to know how to speak with them and pull the right information out of them (which is sometimes a hassle when the place has a silo mentality)</p>
<p>Human Computer Interaction (what I do) - study user needs, come up with designs that meet requirements, whether a toaster or a web site. Lots of people from customers, to users, to engineers who will build it, industrial designers, blah blah. </p>
<p>My wife is a former plant rat (manufacturing) and now manufacturing IT consultant and she deals with people constantly as Chuck pointed out above. Nothing than a young(er) woman in designer clothes walking the line with the line workers, schedulers, foremen, etc. in tow. Got the golf cart royal treatment a few times. Later in her career she got to work on pharmaceutical process automation, lots of people there too.</p>
<p>this is quite an interesting post, considering houw industrial engineering is claimed to give you more expertise in the management field and is known as a combo of engineering and business. your claim that IE can lead to various jobs is definitely true as far as i’ve heard, but manufacturing jobs are usually the popular career options for industrial engineers</p>
<p>First, can someone hire turbo93 to redo this CC interface…! The WHITE it’s blinding me X_X </p>
<p>You don’t have to directly manage folks to be an IE (though later in your career, you are much more likely too), but you do need to be able to WORK with people (to be any type of engineer, really). As you get older, you will find it easier to work and then manage some folks. Of course, you can always follow the “individual contributor” path, many do, it’s a choice.</p>