After my earlier flippant remarks I feel that I should probably make a substantive comment….
As has been highlighted by a number of posts here, engineering is quite a broadly defined profession; but within the context of question let’s talk about the role of a degree qualified Engineering Officer within the armed forces. A common misconception is that Engineering Officers are merely commissioned versions of technical airmen (and vice versa), this is definitely not the case. Whilst one supervises/advises the other (depending on your point of view
) there is a huge difference between how the two are trained and operate. To make a gross generalisation technical airmen learn through process and experience whereas engineering officers are employed to ask why, and understand systems from purely analytical point of view. That is to say, a techo will approach a problem from a where have I seen this before, what did my training tell me and how can I fault find it point of view. Hopefully, a good engineering officer will view it from the perspective of why does this system perform in such a manner and what are the larger impacts. Like I said, a gross generalisation, but an effective one none the less.
However, to answer your original query… an engineering degree is a lot of hard work and you need to consider if it actually supports your real goal of being a pilot. It’s a nice thing to have and to be able to fall back on, but it’s also a very good way of burning yourself out before pilots course. Being an engineering officer is an excellent career (please don’t listen to the nah sayers with an axe to grind). The variety of employment is very wide and the skills and experience that you will acquire are very marketable. Something I used to say to the guys when working at the SQN was “If you don’t know what it is that I’m doing most the time, I’m happy. It means that I’m resolving issues before they impact on you on the floor and keeping everything in place to see the jets flying.”
Be careful with mentioning the hands on, not intrested in management thing whilst doing recruiting. This may view this as not being an officer like attribute and use it to rule you out for a pilot position.
Cheers!
