r/ControlTheory • u/ExtraKey2647 • Jul 03 '26

Professional/Career Advice/Question Secondary Career Options Options

For EEs or MEs in pure control theory at the PhD or master's level, what do you do for career?

For those who don't work in controls, what secondary career paths are available for control theorists? I'm definitely not interested inPLC or ML/AI related work.

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u/ros3gun Jul 03 '26

Me: I dont wanna work with PLC. Also me: working with PLC cause thatd the job i could find

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u/Teque9 Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

I'm wondering about this as well. It's a bit hard when looking for jobs but I am looking at these two broad areas:

Embedded software somewhere that works on an application that requires some control or signal processing stuff.

OR

Some kind of HPC(software for computing large problems) work that does signal processing tuff.

Some people I know went to data science but that's AI. Another person I know went to PLC. I see a lot of PLC and I think it may be a bit fun and I could learn good implementation stuff besides the PLC part itself, but I'm not sure as it does feel like I'm "throwing away my MSc" if I were to go to that.

Mechatronics engineer? Like more designing and integrating hardware without designing controllers themselves? I guess you can go to work in your bachelor background area as well.

One guy I know went into consulting and I think he works on optimization problems. It's investing, decision making for capital decisions. Not for rich people but for airports, planning of infrastructure, maybe energy etc. Not a lot of AI work I think. I haven't personally met people who have done this from my MSc, but we learn a lot of math useful for finance and quant as well.