I wouldn't say that GR, there's a whole world of servicemen and drivers down there at the bottom. We engineers are such a bunch of self deprecating chaps aren't we? No wonder we let 'them' walk all over us...
He's due to become an engineering graduate and if he moves into, lets say, retail management I reckon he'd better be prepared to do a bit of shelf filling, stock taking and till rattling before he moves into corporate HQ. And if he stays in engineering it wouldn't do him any harm to try his hand at some of those tool fetching, torch holding, grease gun wielding jobs to learn his way about before shuffling off to the back office, designing avionic systems.