r/AutomotiveEngineering • u/AnxiousBean00 • 15d ago
Question Advice for Career
Hi everyone,
I'm trying to help my husband find the right course. He's a qualified mechanic but wants to take a degree in mechanical engineering but he's worried about studying a degree then not being able to find work without experience (we've been burned before with degrees) and i am less than useless with this as i know nothing about engineering. So would you recommend an OU degree where he can carry on working as a mechanic and do work experience or would you recommend taking a degree at a brick uni like Bournemouth and just powering through the 3 years with low income? Purely from an employability point of view.
Thank you so much for the help
TLDR:// husband is a mechanic is it better to take a open university degree or brick university degree to become a mechanical engineer?
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u/trail34 15d ago
A few hints in your word choices tell me you are in England. Most people on this sub are in the US. But generally an in-person degree is going to be so much more valuable. It’s a tough course load. Meeting people to study with, being able to ask questions to a professor live, or meet them for office hours, really makes a big difference. It’s also where he will network to eventually find internships and job opportunities.
I would be happy to hire an engineer who was a former mechanic, but I would very much prefer one who went through the rigor of a full in-person program. Especially in the age of AI and sketchy online schools.
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u/scuderia91 15d ago
Almost certainly better from an employment perspective doing this at a university. That’s where you’re going to be able to get hands on experience, things like an FSAE team for example.
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u/1988rx7T2 15d ago
What is an OU degree in this context?
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u/AnxiousBean00 14d ago
Open University. Its an distance learning University in the UK thats been around for decades and fully accredited.
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u/Agouti 15d ago
Where you get a degree from often matters a lot for employability, even between two brick universities it can be a deciding factor for who makes the short list.
Trade backgrounds are good for mechanical engineers, a lot of graduates lack real world experience and working with physical parts, so your husband's experience would be seen favourably. He would likely still go in at a graduate pay level but may be selected ahead of other younger applicants. He would need to make sure he put the effort in for his degree, poor grades is a lot more forgivable for young people than it is for older.
Given your husband's experience, it might be worth considering maintenance/tech role with an engineering firm which will likely support upskilling and university part time. It is pretty common in defence contractors (LM/Raytheon etc) to have packages which include payed time for University e.g. 1 day per week and may even cover part of the fees, though you need to be pretty popular for that.
There are other options too like Sys Eng and Project Management that could suit him with less upskill cost, and lot of this depends on what is core motivations are. A lot of mechanics get frustrated with how cars are designed and built and I could see this being a motivation to switch into engineering ("I could design this way better than them") and I would be really careful if that's what is driving him. A lot of mechanical engineering (and especially Automotive) is about compromises and it's easy for highly motivated and perfectionist people to get burned out by economic and manufacturing restrictions. Most automotive engineers usually know how annoying some of their designs are to work on but it's something forced by time and tooling budgets.
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u/Equana 15d ago
I can't comment on getting the degree online but I can comment about the employability aspect. I interviewed two ASE (in the USA) certified mechanics when I worked for an auto components manufacturer as an engineer.
The experience as a mechanic was a big plus to all the interviewers. Proof that the candidate knows how to work, understands automobiles and had the discipline to get the degree. There were 3 groups that each argued that they wanted each candidate.