Hi,

First thing is that you might get more responses if you explain why you are asking.

But I'm going to write this assuming you're an undergraduate student. This is from a UK perspective, and also I personally don't work in electrical power engineering  but I do work with many colleagues who do.

In my experience (thinking of the power engineers I've worked with over the years) the answer to all these is basically "it depends":

Is specialization applied in the company your work for? Yes for some engineers but not for others. We have a mixture of specialist and generalist engineers.

If the answer to the first question is yes, what are the sub-specialties titles? There aren't any. The role title is the same irrespective of the technical specilaism. Ok, maybe I'm being a bit pedantic there, if you ask them what their field is they will give arrange of answers - because I work in a particular industry which has very specific spelicialisations I'll let others answer more generally as to what these might be.

After graduation and having BS degree in electrical engineering, how many years for a candidate to develop to a specialist in his discipline? Between 1 and 40. Seriously. Some graduates immediately find themselves in a specialist role which they never change from. Others move around a lot before very late in their career finding they are now a specialist.

Do you consider advanced degree such as MS or PHD a requirement? It depends what role it is for. Some specialist engineers have PhDs, some have no degree. Probably the most common (in the UK) is "just" a Bachelor's degree.

Do you consider assignment in manufacturing or vender factories or in design office a requirement? Slightly odd question as that (particularly "design office") is where specialist engineers work, other than those who work in consultancies. In consultancy we will normally be taking on engineers who've worked in other industries for between 5 and 40 years, but then we do also take in graduates.

Which discipline is most favored? In what way: do you mean which has the most jobs? Or which pays the best? Or which is the most interesting? Or which is most likely to have long term career prospect? The answers to these are often opposites! But anyway, even if anyone gives you an answer to any of those question be wary about trusting it. Every engineer can only speak for how they find their own discipline, and you'll find that any two engineers will give you different answers. Personally I always advise to follow a discipline you are actually interested in, because you will always do better at something you are interested in rather than one which you are not.

But the biggest piece of advice I can give is: be very, very careful about becoming a specialist engineer. You may find you are not very employable. The most employable engineers are usually those who can solve any challenge they are given - even if they are organising other engineers to solve many parts of it. There was a very interesting IET talk recently on the "T shaped" engineer: that is an engineer who has some specialism (the upright of the "T") and good generalist skills (the cross bar of the "T"). Even better is to be a "n" or "m" shaped engineer, having 2 or 3 or more specialisms with the generalism as well. Then when one specialism becomes obsolete  you still have the others. Even in consultancy - where our job is to provide specialist expertise - those are the types of engineers we like to employ, as they are always marketable. Whereas the real specialist can sit on the shelf for months waiting for the right assignment to come along.

Of course others may well have a different view, since there's no one set of rules in engineering.

Hope that helps,

Andy

Hi,

First thing is that you might get more responses if you explain why you are asking.

But I'm going to write this assuming you're an undergraduate student. This is from a UK perspective, and also I personally don't work in electrical power engineering  but I do work with many colleagues who do.

In my experience (thinking of the power engineers I've worked with over the years) the answer to all these is basically "it depends":

Is specialization applied in the company your work for? Yes for some engineers but not for others. We have a mixture of specialist and generalist engineers.

If the answer to the first question is yes, what are the sub-specialties titles? There aren't any. The role title is the same irrespective of the technical specilaism. Ok, maybe I'm being a bit pedantic there, if you ask them what their field is they will give arrange of answers - because I work in a particular industry which has very specific spelicialisations I'll let others answer more generally as to what these might be.

After graduation and having BS degree in electrical engineering, how many years for a candidate to develop to a specialist in his discipline? Between 1 and 40. Seriously. Some graduates immediately find themselves in a specialist role which they never change from. Others move around a lot before very late in their career finding they are now a specialist.

Do you consider advanced degree such as MS or PHD a requirement? It depends what role it is for. Some specialist engineers have PhDs, some have no degree. Probably the most common (in the UK) is "just" a Bachelor's degree.

Do you consider assignment in manufacturing or vender factories or in design office a requirement? Slightly odd question as that (particularly "design office") is where specialist engineers work, other than those who work in consultancies. In consultancy we will normally be taking on engineers who've worked in other industries for between 5 and 40 years, but then we do also take in graduates.

Which discipline is most favored? In what way: do you mean which has the most jobs? Or which pays the best? Or which is the most interesting? Or which is most likely to have long term career prospect? The answers to these are often opposites! But anyway, even if anyone gives you an answer to any of those question be wary about trusting it. Every engineer can only speak for how they find their own discipline, and you'll find that any two engineers will give you different answers. Personally I always advise to follow a discipline you are actually interested in, because you will always do better at something you are interested in rather than one which you are not.

But the biggest piece of advice I can give is: be very, very careful about becoming a specialist engineer. You may find you are not very employable. The most employable engineers are usually those who can solve any challenge they are given - even if they are organising other engineers to solve many parts of it. There was a very interesting IET talk recently on the "T shaped" engineer: that is an engineer who has some specialism (the upright of the "T") and good generalist skills (the cross bar of the "T"). Even better is to be a "n" or "m" shaped engineer, having 2 or 3 or more specialisms with the generalism as well. Then when one specialism becomes obsolete  you still have the others. Even in consultancy - where our job is to provide specialist expertise - those are the types of engineers we like to employ, as they are always marketable. Whereas the real specialist can sit on the shelf for months waiting for the right assignment to come along.

Of course others may well have a different view, since there's no one set of rules in engineering.

Hope that helps,

Andy

 Great thanks dear Andy for participating in the discussions.   

I am Sr. Consultant in an oil and gas company.   In the company, general engineers and specialised one are available, the later is for highly technical issues.  The questions relate to the specialised engineers.  We have classifications and requirements and would like to benchmark with others.

I hope the above clarifies some of the misunderstandings   

Best regards 

Ok, that puts a different perspective on it.

My answers to 1 and 2 are still as above - I work in the rail industry so our specilisations will probably be quite different to yours.

Third question, perhaps surprisingly, still stands pretty much. But I suppose before we would "sell" a consultant as a specialist they would probably have had at least 5 years post graduate experience? Really hard to put a number on it though, it depends on the level of specialist expertise required - my consultancy work is based on 40 years' experience, and really does use all of it sometimes - but not all the time. 

Fourth question, if we only recruited consultants with Masters or PhDs for specialist roles we'd find it incredibly hard to recruit! As above, probably Bachelors' is the most common. I've been recruiting specialist engineers for 35 years now, I learnt long long ago that I really don't care what qualification they have - it's looking for a mixture of theoretical and experientially knowledge, and different people get it in different ways. That said, I will admit that we have more PhDs in the consultancy work then when I was running R&D teams.

Fifth question, as above we do recruit graduate consultants. It is hard for them though. It is much easier for everyone if they can get considerable design experience on the client side first.

If I was to very much generalise on those last two questions, a PhD consultant can probably be sold as a specialist immediately (but in a very narrow field). if they have Bachelors (or no degree) it's probably 5 to 10 years' experience first. But there will always be many exceptions. 

Final question: thinking now about which specialisms are the most valued in consultancy, you would need to ask people in the oil and gas industry, because this is very sector specific.

I'm not sure if that helps much, but may help a bit.

Out of interest I just checked one of our current job adverts, all it specifies is:

"Experience as an engineer in the areas of [broadly defined specialist areas]"
"Qualified to a degree level in a relevant discipline or have equivalent level in a combination of other educational qualifications / relevant experience."

We very deliberately don't specify further than that because there are so many exceptions - we don't want to exclude good people with arbitrary limits. When we interview we'll explore the depth of specialist expertise, and consider if it fills gaps in our current expertise and our current (and expected) client requirements.

Thanks,

Andy