What Career Paths are out there?
Hi all, trying to really make sure I have an understanding of what paths are available to me.
I am currently 3 years in at a very large MEP firm. I work in Electrical, and have passed the PE Exam. I work on a little bit of everything, and am able to pretty much carry most smaller jobs from start to finish. I also do some APM work for one of the PMs I have become close with.
I have begun thinking about where I want to get to in my career, but I want to make sure I know all the different paths, how they pay, and how stressful they are. Here are the ones I can think of:
Technical Expert - continue advancing Electrically, become Senior Engineer, focus on 1 or 2 areas
Project Manager - become more client facing, have a good technical base of all disciplines, but no longer sealing work. I think this pays more? Probably more stressful
People Manager - Manage a team of engineers, probably while also doing design work. Seems stressful and doesn’t pay much more?
Go work in Construction - people say this and that it makes more money and is more stressful, but I really have no idea what it actually means. Are they talking about being a project engineer?
Owner’s Rep - work on owner’s projects for awhile, swap to their side. Seems lower stress but not sure what the pay is like.
I’ve also seen a few piers that work on Data Centers and then go to work for Data Center companies. Not really sure what their job entails at that point, I guess they are kind of owners reps?
Thank you in advance for everyone’s responses.