How to Choose the Best Mechanical Engineering Career Path in 2025

How Do You Choose a Career in Mechanical Engineering?

Some say mechanical engineering is just designing blocks with holes. Others call it the liberal arts of engineering. But how do you decide what career path to take with your mechE degree? The breadth of field makes it hard to get a clear-cut answer.

I graduated with a Bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Cornell in 2015. I mostly got anecdotal experiences and advice from interning or chatting with classmates about what companies or industries sucked. Then I aimed for a city I wanted to live in and chased the best opportunities I came across. That sort of worked, sort of didn’t. I found myself facing hiring freezes, layoffs, and stagnation in my role far too often.

This random-stumbling approach for a mechE career is far from ideal, but is actually what I’ve seen a lot of people default to. Even now 10 years into my career spanning Apple, Meta, and several hardware startups, interning and working across nine different industries, I’m still figuring it out and suffering for my sloppy choices.

If only there was a comprehensive resource that could break down all the possible career paths so I could compare them to make a more informed decision. As far as I know, it doesn’t exist. So I spent a few days making one.

There’s so many different job titles and industries. I thought grouping them by functional domains of work and by industry would be the best balance of clean and comprehensive.

Now how do we compare them? I formed a lot of opinions over my career, but any metrics I choose would reflect my biases and preferences. What’s important to me may not be important to everyone else. But everybody has fundamental needs and things they yearn for.

Metrics Based in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a prevalent theory in psychology that conceptualizes the needs that motivate human behavior. The original formulation states that there are five sets of basic needs: Physiological, Safety, Love & Belonging, Esteem, and Self-Actualization. Each need will suck up the majority of your attention until it’s somewhat satiated, at which point you level up to begin addressing the next level of needs.

This largely checks out in the context of your career since regardless of your ambitious visions for the future, the first thing you gotta do is get a job that will help you develop critical skills and afford food and a place to live. If we desperately need a first job or to pivot out of a terrible one, we may not have the luxury to weigh the vibes or possible trajectories when choosing.

But it’s critical that we consider our future needs since roles you take are expected to be at least a two year commitment. The role brands you and it’s hard to pivot into other roles or industries since you’ll be perceived as a specialist in your current role or low-key a quitter for switching.

Maslow’s framework serves as a sensible scaffold to ground our metrics in our short and long term needs, considerations our future selves will thank us for. In the context of evaluating our careers, I’ve translated them into the following:

1. Physiological → Compensation - Salary statistics

   1. How well can you afford to feed and house yourself and your loved ones?

2. Safety → Employment Stability - Layoff Risk & Skill Transferability

   1. Is your job going to be safe or can you at least get a different job?

3. Love & Belonging → Vibes and Work-Life Balance

   1. What’s the work culture like?

   2. Will you have time for a life outside of work?

4. Esteem → Recognition, Freedom, & Self-worth

   1. Are the results of your work visible and tangible? Will you be acknowledged?

   2. Do you have the freedom to do what you think is the right course of action?

   3. What kind of impact are you making on society?

5. Self-Actualization → Growth & Entrepreneurial Opportunity

   1. Are you learning and growing, utilizing all your strengths and becoming the best you can be?

   2. How much innovation and capital does the space see?

   3. Are you empowered to quit and start your own thing if you don’t like it at the company?

For each of these basic needs I’ve included key metrics and evaluated each role to the best of my ability, consulting with friends in other industries, online engineering forums, and the latest AI models like Claude and ChatGPT.

This table is neither perfect nor exhaustive. It’s just my first pass at gathering all this info succinctly into one place. I added notes in boxes with little black triangles at the top right clarifying a metric or my reasoning behind a certain evaluation. Mouse over them to read it. Some evaluations may be up for debate or come across as offensive. I’d like to apologize up front if anything rubs you the wrong way, this is just my biased opinion and meant to be a helpful informational resource. If you have something to say, feel free to comment below, I’ll be sure to read it and take your thoughts into account for the future.

Physiological → Compensation

I pulled salary statistics from Glassdoor and Levels.fyi. Each salary callout is a weblink to its source so you can verify that I didn’t pull these numbers out of thin air. The “Top Recorded” column is just the highest listed compensation I could find on the internet, not the true cap. Some of these numbers are stunningly high, typically from senior engineers with specialized skills that joined big tech at the right time, right before a major stock value increase. Few mechE’s are making north of $500,000 a year so I also included a column for top 90th percentile earnings to provide more reasonable expectations.

Safety → Employment Stability - Layoff Risk & Skill Transferability

Some roles are more prone to layoffs, like those that are seen as more replaceable, less critical to company success, or roles with cyclical workloads and are in for a period of under-utilization. Certain industries like Biotech right now experience more volatility and bankruptcies, making them more prone to layoffs.

On the other hand, less glamorous industries like HVAC or data center engineering usually see higher demand and a talent shortage, making them more stable.

Domains and industries where you do more varied, creative work alongside cross-functional partners like electrical engineers, roboticists, industrial design, UX research, and marketing will give you more opportunities to pick up versatile skills and perspectives. These roles such as product design or mechatronics afford a broader set of skills, enabling easier transitions to other roles compared to the reverse.

Love & Belonging → Vibes & Work-Life Balance

The nature of our day to day work can make us happy or miserable depending on how it suits our preferences. So I took a shot at describing the nature of each role with a couple words to help you get a sense of the culture and vibes there. Very subjective, but hopefully useful for some of you.

Some roles are chill while most jobs at an Elon Musk company will work you to the bone. Many jobs are cyclically hectic, driven by build timelines, product launch dates, or simulation requests from an engineering partner.

I won’t say that a chill, slow pace is better than the grind because some people really enjoy working a lot and hate being slowed down by coworkers’ lack of urgency. The job market is increasingly volatile so working your butt off to develop valuable skills and get ahead can help hedge against layoffs or being trapped in a dead end role.

These metrics are super subjective and different people want different things so I left these two columns un-colorcoded.

My only word of caution to those regularly grinding out 60+ hour workweeks is to step back often and vibe check yourself. Make sure that your fixation on work doesn’t cause you to come across as arrogant or impatient. Giving off an air of frustration or absentmindedness when interacting with people closes more doors than are opened by technical excellence. Nobody cares about this work that’s consuming you even half as much as you do. People won’t work nor hang out with a capable jerk unless they absolutely have to.

The happiest people I know are those who are able to leave work at work and prioritize quality time with their partners and families. Not the guy slaving away every night, fantasizing that success will buy him love.

Esteem → Recognition, Freedom, & Self-Worth

Getting acknowledged, finding meaning and autonomy in our work elevates our confidence and sense of self-worth. I find meaning in work based on how much impact I contribute towards building a cool thing, and how that thing impacts the bigger picture of the company, user, and society.

We could play a huge role in building something, but if that thing turns out to be useless or even net damaging to society or our environment, that largely undercuts the sense of impact and value we delivered.

Recognition is largely a function of the visibility and tangibility of our work. Many back-end roles like Quality, Test, and Support are highly impactful in developing and launching products but may be taken for granted until something goes horribly wrong.

Freedom to do what you think is right, autonomy, having a say in how you get the job done makes any role more enjoyable and fulfilling. Some roles like consumer product design offer a lot of creative freedom to explore and iterate while some regulatory-heavy or manufacturing roles have more tightly bound processes and deliverables.

Self-Actualization → Growth & Entrepreneurial Opportunity

Most of us have an innate desire to grow, realize our full potential, and become the best possible version of ourselves. Roles like mechatronics and product design have high technical ceilings and span a lot of cross-functional disciplines, resulting in near-limitless opportunities to grow and apply your depth and breadth of skills. Given the choice, we may wish to avoid roles where the job is very repetitive and limited in scope because hitting the growth ceiling also means stagnating salaries since a less experienced person can also do the job.

Building hardware is expensive so how much innovation and investment a role sees significantly impacts career options and trajectory. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in AI each year while traditional mechE roles cling to their diminishing relevance and wages. To avoid being left behind, I’m looking towards the opportunities unlocked by AI advancements like smarter tools, robotics, and automation equipment. Whether AI-powered robots will become useful in 2 years or 30 is yet to be seen, but it’s clear that this is where the money is going for the foreseeable future. I’ll be diving into how to leverage the latest AI developments into my hardware career so subscribe to my channel and newsletter to stay up to date!

I’ve always hated doing things I don’t agree with, so my startup projects served as a solace from the daily grind of work I didn’t believe in. The dream of turning a side project into an entrepreneurial endeavor served as an escape and a useful source of inspiration for me when I felt stuck. Certain roles offer a lot more opportunities to pick up valuable skills, experiences, and insights that empower you to build something of your own. Industries with low barriers to entry, less regulatory hurdles, and more capital being invested offer more opportunities to spin up your own product or service. I think the roles most empowered for entrepreneurial ventures are product design and mechatronics in consumer electronics and robotics automation.

Entrepreneurship offers the biggest potential upside in terms of compensation, growth, and autonomy. A successful entrepreneur is probably the happiest, most developed version of themselves. However, it also carries the highest risk, possibly wiping out your opportunities to grow, to contribute value, your sense of self-worth, belonging, stability, and your income. Choose the path that feels right for you and stay tuned for my next video on my 7 failed startup ideas and what I learned through those painful, eye-opening experiences.

Afterword

I’m honored to share that I’ve been invited to speak at Product Development Expo, October 21-22 in Phoenix, Arizona. PD Expo is an ambitious new conference focused on practical, hands-on training to develop the real-world engineering skills woefully not taught in college. Accelerate your career and hedge against layoffs, link below! Thanks for watching, I hope this was helpful or interesting for you and I’ll see you next time!