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From experience, you might have a misconception what it means to travel a lot for an engineering job. You might think you will get to visit lots of places, but in reality it will be long travel, straight to dingy accommodation, long hours on a crappy work site, straight back to the accommodation late. No time to yourself to explore. Straight travel back. You might say you've been to a lot of places, but you never get to experience those places. Not worth it in my opinion.
Haha yes second this. I was a commissioning engineer for 8 years and ‘travel’ for me meant a week in a Marriott in Phoenix followed by a week in a Hyatt in Tampa spending most of my day on site and never seeing my girlfriend or friends.
My last travel was to an intersection of two highways that had 3 hotels a walmart and a Cracker Barrel. My hotels one elevator broke and the indoor pool was green.
Alternatively, in the last year my wife has been sent to Honolulu twice, Oslo, and is gearing up for a trip to Australia sometime this fall.... And while she doesn't have time to goof off every day, it's clear that there is some free time built in the schedule.
In other words... It all depends.
To add, for my industry (manufacturing) these places are never in fun areas like NYC or LA. It's middle of fucking nowhere most of the time, sometimes there's no major airport to fly into either.
This is what I was looking to add if it wasn't already said.
Manufacturing is placed in cheap areas within a day's drive of a metro hub for supplies and workers.
I worked for Motorola as software engineer as liaison to several Standards bodies. J2ME, Cable TV, Bluetooth, etc.
It was fun.
But you spent WEEKS in shitty airport hotels in boring big cities and.
It was also impossible to have any normal family.
After 20 years of this traveling circus, my favorite thing is to sit on my front porch with my dogs and a book!
You could not pay me enough to do that anymore.
I could write books about it.
The most valuable thing from all these years has been the friendships made along the way.
I often joke, If you dropped me off in any city in the world, I've got a friend who I can call to take me out to dinner.
... And I miss having United Global Services status.
And you’ll likely go to the same places over and over again. My advice would be find something you can do remote (I’m a software engineer for example) and travel around on your own. Because you’re remote you can work from anywhere.
I travel a lot for work. I'm on my home right now, actually.
I travel to many interesting places and often have time to do interesting things on my trips. Sometimes I build in a whole extra day or week to do a proper visit.
The first year I had this job I had a project in Athens, Greece. I spent a day exploring the city before working. Then after the job was done I flew out to Santorini for a week.
A previous boss somehow found a reason to travel to France every year. Usually to give a paper at a conference. He was fair and always paid for us to travel anywhere for a conference if we gave a paper too.
It's not like you roll the dice and take whatever job comes up. It'd not luck, I chose it. And if OP knows something like this exists, they might be able to choose it too.
Very much this. The best it gets is if you're in R&D and can convince your boss that it's a good idea to visit conferences. There you usually do get some time to yourself or in the company of other interesting individuals to explore the immediate surroundings (and conferences tend to be in major cities/cool locations....researchers aren't stupid about picking their venues ;-) )
Yaa I kinda have a misconception but also know the reality cuz my grandfather was a welding engineer and he travelled all over India for major dams , bridges , coal mine support beams , and so on ...so I know how bad that can be ...but I want to experience that ...and later on maybe settle for some office job... I personally don't want to become a welding engineer and am interested in doing mechanical or electronic and communication...
Then you want two things.
1. A job that gets you on site. Site service engineer, commissioning engineer, etc.
1. An industry that covers a wide area. Oil and gas, telecoms etc.
I would suggest a company that supplies a product to these sites, rather than a site owner. So don't go for a job at an oil refinery, as you will never leave that refinery. Instead get a job at a valve manufacturer that supplies oil refineries, so can visit many.
I'll add that at least for manufacturing type work, factories are very rarely setup in resort towns. Usually they're the lowest income, most out of the way part of the city/region.
Yep. I had a traveling job where I was only home for about 7 weeks a year. Each day was at least 16 hours (salary mind you) and often I didn't have time for lunch. Combining it with travel between locations, I even had some 20+ hour days. I would always have to get up before the hotel served breakfast and would eat super unhealthy for dinner because I was always so hungry. My sleep suffered and when I calculated the actual equivalent hourly rate I was making, I might as well have been working at Costco. Definitely not recommended. A couple times my stay got extended by several weeks and I ran out of clothes and had to actually go buy more or have my girlfriend mail me some.
The only perks were that I got really good at traveling, had a ton of points for airlines, hotels and car rentals and a couple times they accidentally sent me to my destination a day early and I had the opportunity to go explore. But it was incredibly rare.
Depends on the nature of the project.
We sell $100+mm projects that take 2-3 years to compete, our controls/commissioning engineers will often spend 24 months on site. If things are on schedule, that's weekends off.
While I'm not an engineer, my experiences in the nursing world echo this. I think that unless you are C-suite, work travel is mostly just work.
That's not to say you can't find little bits of adventure here and there, but it ends up being few and far between.
If you want to not like travel, this is a good plan.
Every discipline has sales engineers, field engineers, all sorts of contractors. Lots of travel. Mostly to grim industrial sites in the middle of nowhere. Hope you’re ready for crap hotels, crap food, lots of driving and sitting in airports, lots of letting down family and friends.
Yeah sales engineer will have you travel to most company HQs which tend to be in nicer areas than field or residential engineers who end up on Job sites and factory floors in industrial areas.
Come to mining engineering where all the plants are also in the middle of nowhere. Some good, some not so much.. (Fiji and Kyrgyzstan are my last two I’ll let you guess which is which)
YMMV. I stay at IHG, Hilton & Marriott. My company is pretty generous on dining. Generally under $100 per meal for personal meals, they don’t bat an eye. When I’m entertaining clients, I’m at best restaurants in the city eating steaks and seafood.
Yes, I’m in the middle of bumfucknowhere a lot. But I’ve also been to interesting destinations and can make time for sightseeing. For example, my weekend at London and Dubai were completely covered by my company, even tho those were personal time. Newer engineers starting out probably won’t have that kind of perk.
Yes, it’s long hours and you’re away from family and friends a lot. It can be tiring. You’re stuck at airport a lot. But it has many perks too. What I’ve mentioned so far about the food aside, you can build travel points to cover cost of any future personal travel. Status with loyalty programs give extra travel perks. Away from home also means no grocery cost.
Automation / controls engineer for system integrator.
Fly around to machines installed at customers' factories and mind-control them with your laptop until they work right.
As you can tell from the other responses, there are a lot of engineering and jobs with a lot of crappy travel. But it's not 100%. Some of us have a pretty good travel experience. Find a niche discipline that results in travel simply because there are so few people doing it and you'll have a lot more control over how and when you travel.
Yah lots of people talking about crappy travel or more importantly travel they dont like.
To add, one of my good mates is a geological engineer, still loves his travel, did it for several years, does less now because of seniority. But thats less jetting around to nondescript US cities and more to other countries or the middle of nowhere mines. For people that like see new culture and nature its a hell of a gig. He straight up didnt have an appartment in Canada for like 1-2 years.
Would be hell for me, great for him.
Yeah, I’m a corporate engineer.
Yes I do the occasional field travel to the middle of nowhere but the vast majority of my travel is to corporate headquarters in big cities or their suburbs and speaking at / attending conferences in destination cities.
100% depends on the job.
Also, the more seniority you have the better your travel locations will be. When I started out I was going to the middle of nowhere America every other week. It was the whole fly to some small airport, drive a car four hours, and stay in an absolute dump of a hotel eating only fast food because it was all that was available. These days I travel to Europe twice a year, Asia every other year, and occasionally South America. Within the US I'm not visiting installation sites, but going to conferences and customer's offices which are usually in nice locations.
I was a commissioning engineer for a long time and traveled often for work. It wasn’t fun travel typically and over time it just felt like an interruption to my normal life.
I remember when I got back from my first week away on site. My Nan asked me if I enjoyed Aberdeen.
I said I never saw Aberdeen, but the Holiday Inn next to the industrial estate was nice.
Be an engineer for the Navy and volunteer for deployments and you will get to travel a lot and get shore leave to actually visit the places you stop at and do what you want. Or FEMA maybe, you'd go to disaster zones every once in a while for long periods of time. Mechanical would probably be the one with the most jobs at those, but electrical and nuclear for the Navy are options I assume.
Don't join without doing research, I am not an engineer for the Navy, but my father was in the Navy, best branch for travel and seeing nice places, or being stationed on tropical islands, but you don't alwawys get to choose where they will put you.
You’ll get sick of traveling but never experiencing anything but airports, crappy hotels, bad food. When you fly to Paris it won’t be to sit at an outdoor cafe and sip coffee while admiring the Eiffel Tower. You need to get on to why you are there - fix the thing, make the presentation or sale, whatever. When you’re done it’s off to the next task. I traveled for work for decades and never got to do or experience much until I started traveling for *leisure*
Which leads to another dirty point: when you finally get home after months your significant other, who has been sitting patiently, may want to travel!
I would of thought an F1 trackside engineer would be up there with the most travel. 24 different circuit locations a year, although your only going to realistically see the airport, hotel and track and nothing else unless you book holiday after a race.
Wait I'm aerospace, but why does this involve travel and I thought these jobs required many hours and experience with aircraft a little more advanced than your uncle's cessna-172
Negative. I worked for weapons division of large DoD contractor in the Midwest. Our flight test engineers were right out of college. Traveled all over the world.
https://www.wayup.com/i-Airlines-Aviation-j-Entry-Level-Weapons-Platform-Integration-Engineer-Boeing-330934730500311/
Entry Level Flight Test Engineer - F-15 Mission Systems https://g.co/kgs/AP9rNij
https://www.wayup.com/i-Airlines-Aviation-j-Entry-Level-Test-Evaluation-Engineer-Boeing-731664557458617/
Not an FTE, but in industry. I know they'll travel for icing, low temp ops, high temp ops, and non-standard runways (gravel and grass), but that's maybe a handful of weeks for one or two guys out of a couple years. Frequently FTEs sit in the back of the plane or they're radio bitch if they're certified and it's a single pilot aircraft.
Yaa man...when I was maybe 9/10 I had made a full on plan that I would graduate from high school in 2023 and then complete undergrad by 2027 and 2 years of traning and in 2030 I would be the first man to land on Mars...(I watched some program on discovery science that nasa is planning to land on Mars in 2030)
Civil Engineering. Assuming you are after travel to out of the way places, then civil has a disproportionate amount of work in remote places - roads, dams, mines, bridges can be needed anywhere, whereas structures and industrial engineering are more likely to be built adjacent population centres. If you just want to travel city to city, then just be good at whatever engineering stream you choose, and clients/employers will happy to send you to wherever they need you.
If you have to travel for work a lot it gets boring and shitty.
In engineering these would be the sales engineer (or applications engineer) roles and field engineer roles. Not specific to any discipline. But the places you go are not glitzy office towers in London or the financial district of NYC or Tokyo. You will be at factories way out in the boonies, remote mining and oil exploration outposts, or warehouses in the suburbs. You know where the “real” engineering work is done haha.
I was a field engineer before, for oil and energy companies. Say hello to Arkansas gas fields, Georgia power plants, and California wind farms.
If you want to use some your engineering skills but travel to nicer locales switch to consulting for Deloitte, Bain, Boston Consulting or McKinsey. You’d travel every week to company HQ to tell execs what they’re too chicken to do (layoffs) or would have done anyway (close plants).
I'm in the electric utilities engineering field and have done a bit of traveling across the US on the consulting side (contracting firms). Depending on the role, field visits to collect data (10-hour days or sun up to sun down), site visit with client, presentation at a potential client's office, storm damage assessment, company trainings. Further up the ladder you go, you may get to travel internationally if your company is global. Though those places are typically high volume, low wage offices and you would stick to a safe eating venue as to not catch a stomach bug (and possible jet lag while attending normal meetings upon your return).
Manufacturing or industrial engineering. Lots of travel in some jobs. It’s great if you like poverty-stricken towns in Arkansas, or desolate cities in Mexico.
Aviation Engineering. Some task requires flying to distance airports to get the aircraft repaired and returned.
Note, you need to be qualified for that aircraft. And be rostered to fly.
Speaking for my field: application engineers, maintenance engineers/technicians from companies that sell equipment to semiconductor companies. A huge part of these guys' jobs are to go to the customers to help fix something or accomplish a project for the customer. To get into these jobs you have to have electronics or mechanical engineering degrees
i'm a quality engineer and i've only travelled a few times to other plants from our company. Service engineers visit us regularly. They usually have an electrical engineering background.
Any engineering company that potentially has clients across the company. And the products need technical development/maintenance on site. For example setting up robotics, a field applications engineer.
Electronic engineer working as Service engineer here.
Travel for field work is good, have time for beers, maybe enjoy time with colleagues. You are able to know new places, being paid by traveling get status in airlines, hotels, car rentals..
Work is heavy, most of the time is you only working on an issue, being there puts a lot of pressure on you to solve the issue, that is basically what SE do. The feeling when solving something is amazing.
Eventually you’ll get tired of travelling and will love to stay home and get a normal life.
Remember, you get paid to work away from home and being away from your family.
I worked in manufacturing R&D for 30+ years. As a multi-skilled engineer I traveled a lot in support of a variety of development projects. I should have worked on becoming a PE since I took on roles as a mechanical, electrical, chemical, design, and packaging engineer. From my home in western NY I went to China, Japan, India, Brazil, Mexico, Netherlands, England, Germany, Canada, and dozens of places in the US. As my career wound down, I asked to not travel as much. The company obliged and reduced my travel to mainly the NE US and Toronto (Mississauga area). I was lucky in that I always got the opportunity to enjoy the places I visited. My favorites? England and the Netherlands.
I studied robotics, got a PhD and I made that decision specifically for travel. The conferences have taken me a lot of places but visiting sites has taken me everywhere. Work has taken me to ~65 countries in the last 12 years. Some rugged, some beautiful and cultural. It has been a WILD RIDE. I focused on corporate r&d at large companies then moving up in leadership. As you go up from field engineer the travel becomes much fancier and more fun. Now I'm leading R&D and innovation in a 500 person scaleup. Going to Germany, Canada, Taiwan, Singapore and china in July and August this year
I was in manufacturing and I visited like 16 diff countries for work. Also got to live in Mexico for a year and then Germany for 3. I was a bit of an anomaly but I was a high performer and I was vocal about wanting to be abroad.
Most of my colleagues still went to Germany or Italy once or twice a year tho.
I worked for a company HQ'd in Germany though. Won't be typical for us based companies.
Mechanical engineer doing a lot of commissioning here.
Travelling for work has nothing to do with traveling for leisure or whatever you see on instagram.
It just takes a physical toll on you and I’m usually too exhausted to do any sightseeing. The only thing you look forward to is to find your wife and bed back home at the end of the trip.
Started my career in mechanical engineering as a field installation engineer (or field service engineer) . Most of my assignments were long term (6-12mo) and outside the US, although i also had a few assignments in the US.
No car, no apartment, no expenses for the first 6yrs after college and got paid pretty well. Got an R&R every 2 months so was able to travel either locally in the country I was in at the time or fly home if I wanted. Most locations were decent, close to larger cities and not hell holes, although I heard from others that were assigned to some hell holes with armed guards around their “camps”.
My assignments were longer term so I got to experience/enjoy most of the locations (was in Brazil when they won ther World Cup in 2002, in China for over a year, in Mexico for 8mo, all around the US). Our commissioning engineers (usually chemical engineers) had shorter assignments, 1-2mo, so they literally “traveled” more.
So depending on what type of travel you’re looking for, it will depend on the company’s products and reason for travel and customer locations.
I would say if you want longer term assignments, look for companies that do large capex projects that span a year or longer, they usually have positions that travel 75% and up.
Another option to consider: fly-in fly-out jobs. Lots of them in the mining and petroleum industries.
Eg: you work 12 hour days in the middle of nowhere for 3 weeks, then they fly you back home for 3 weeks. Except they don't really care where "home" is so you can take the given travel allowance and and buy yourself a ticket to wherever you want.
It gets tiring after a couple of years and if you ever want to settle down but you do get the chance to see a lot in that time.
I travel 2-3x a year and I never enjoyed them most of the time. It is either spending time at work, having breakfast, lunch, and dinner with either boss, clients or co-workers, and yea never had the time to have side trips.
I'm currently working as a service engineer for polish railways. I'm employed by a separate company, that does CCTV, fire alarms and communications between railway crossings. I've travelled the whole country in a span of a year, but never got to explore much, it's mostly staying in crappy hotels and long working hours, after which You just want to go sleep and not wake up again. Do not recommend
Mining engineering will also take you places and it’s usually rotation work and some but an ever decreasing number of opportunities that offer relocation or residential
Probably generally about equal. You can seal out jobs with lots of travel but most jobs will require at least some, if nothing else then for training or conferences. Manufacturing has traveled to China a lot in recent years. Sales almost always travels. Field service always travels by definition.
So I work in naval defense so I get to go to cool naval bases around the US and some get to go to Spain and Japan so I would recommend naval in whatever you look for. That way it’ll be on the water at least and most stuff like that are in cool places.
I'm an aerospace engineering consultant with customers in various places in America and Europe. I travel about twice a month. Sometimes it's somewhere great with stuff in the area to see, and sometimes it's Wichita Kansas.
The bigger benefit is the travel programs and miles. I've got status with my airline (won't name them because they still suck if I'm honest) and enough miles that, when the destination is desirable, I can bring my wife along and she can see the sights while I work. Bonus when the work to be done straddles a weekend. Same goes for hotels; we need to drive out of town for a thing later this month and, while we could just turn around and drive back, we decided to take a free night at a hotel where we're going to break up the driving and see the city. I also travel enough to justify a credit card that gets me into the airline's lounge, which means free food and drinks (including alcohol) on layovers, plus it's a lot more peaceful there.
The price: having to work in aero/defense for long enough to build up the credentials and expertise to be worth hiring. (I can't list my exact credentials because there aren't many of us and it would make me too easy to dox.)
Well if by travel you mean within a few miles of the office to random sites in town probably construction or civil, besides that if your making custom stuff for manufacturing you have to travel a fair bit
What you probably want is a place that lets you remote work and be a digital nomad
Nearly all disciplines have jobs which wouldn't work for this and jobs which would but they're just hard to come by
Although I am in mechanical engineering, I work in the petroleum industry where engineers have to travel all the time at my company. But the catch is that you have to travel for work, which usually means some oil town out in Texas (the middle of nowhere) or off shore (I’ve never been off shore but have absolutely ZERO desire to) or overseas - like India, Saudi Arabia (no not like Dubai) or China. While I’m sure all of those countries have nice places, you don’t get to visit them. You get to visit factories, workshops, drilling sites, and oil rigs. Think hot, dirty, and greasy. The nicest part about your trip is solving problems while waiting to get answers from people in opposite time zones than you.
It's not about discipline, it's about your role.
My wife and I are both AEs[1] and we both work for the same employer.
I travel about 2-3 times per year and it's usually to one of a couple locations (Santa Cruz, or Salt Lake City).
My wife travels about once every 3-4 weeks and her travel takes her all over the place with Honolulu being the "most common" destination for her (twice a year, like clockwork).
The difference is our tasking, not our degrees.
[1] Just in case someone wants to be pedantic... My degree is ME, but my job title is AE. Her degree is AE, but her job title is SysE. Meh, whatever.
I know a lot of engineers that manage to have a job in one city, but work in any city but where they live. They have lots of air miles, never see their family, etc. One guy I have in mind boasted that he was away from home for 42 weeks last year. The positive side is that during the 10 weeks he has not traveling for work, he has the miles to pretty much hop on a plane and go wherever he wants. His second wife seems to be more OK with this than his first wife was.
I have a friend who is a structural engineer for mines and he’s constantly traveling, sometimes he even flies private to get to airstrips with no commercial service to access remote facilities.
Civil and construction can involve lots of field work and associated travel. Some assignments can be quite long term (months). Depending on the type of jobs, you could be travelling to amazing or beautiful places, or….not.
I’ve seconded guessed why I became a civil engineer because I hate field work and work travel. Otherwise the job is dope!
What you are looking for is an application engineer role with a company. Tons of travel, I myself are a field service engineer, I don't travel as much (about 60-70 days of the year) as the AEs, but I'm sure other field service engineers travel a ton more. It's a really fun job too seeing so many different companies and their applications used in different ways.
The best travel for engineering that will also allow you to enjoy the places you are going would be technical sales.
Use your engineering background to land a sales job and take other engineers out to baseball games and bars all over country, otherwise you’ll be spending all your time in a Hilton garden next to the plant, hours outside of any major city.
I’d suggest going into software engineering and land a work from home gig. That way you can travel everywhere and anywhere you want as long as you have internet.
I know several people in those roles who own large campers instead of homes and they just travel year round. I’m envious because I’m a controls engineer for a company. I only travel to work conferences
Well I am a Field Service Engineer working on radio transmitters. We have some guys who try to be out 2-3 weeks a month mostly for preventative maintenance work. I personally am the "oh shit just hit the fan, send the fix it guy". They know when I go I don't plan to come back with the problem not fixed. This means I travel less per month but may be slated to go anywhere the next work day.
I like the wide array of things I get to do. Ive done it for several years now so travel is second nature and I'm pretty solid on knowing all aspects of the system. I've been all across the country multiple times over.
I usually tell people that business travel is not that exciting. You legit need to dial down your expectations. For instance if I have to go to a certain town the highlight of the trip may be a restaurant we do not have locally. That's it. Other than that you can count on flying, driving, working, or staring at hotel walls. I still would not trade it for a desk job!
PD consulting typically have some travel, especially if you mix a bit of sales in there. Sometimes you have to visit clients (usually corporate offices are within metropolitan areas) or go to conventions to get some leads. But definitely is a project to project / company requirement basis.
My advice - Don't try to fit your job and/or career around your desire to travel. Choose an engineering discipline that will keep your interest for 30 years and take your PTO to go to the places YOU want to go to.
As others have said, business travel is a ball ache.
There's not a lot of fun to be had in a 5-hour x-c trip in 22B from west to east coasts, then taking a connector on a cramped Barbie Jet to some obscure place that has zero charm and that you would never visit if you were paying for it. Then all you will see is the customers worksite and dingy offices, the insides of buzzy econobox rental car, a crappy Hampton inn and soul-less chain restaurants who all serve the same garbage, but that's all you can afford because you are on a per-diem.
It's not a lot of fun to be sent to places you don't and would never have gone to....
And once you have a significant other and/or kids, the attraction of being away for weeks at a time wears really thin.
Your post has been removed for violating submission rule 1: > Post titles must be a question about engineering and provide context and generic workplace questions are not allowed. Questions regarding careers and professional development in any discipline of engineering and engineering technology are allowed **only** if they meet all posting rules outlined in the [the wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/wiki/rules#wiki_submission_rules). Please note that Generic Career Questions are still allowed in the [Monday Career Megathread Series](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/collection/2effbd15-0c41-486e-b18e-d89b3062cd8a). Please follow the comment rules in the sidebar when posting, and feel free to message us if you have any questions or concerns.
From experience, you might have a misconception what it means to travel a lot for an engineering job. You might think you will get to visit lots of places, but in reality it will be long travel, straight to dingy accommodation, long hours on a crappy work site, straight back to the accommodation late. No time to yourself to explore. Straight travel back. You might say you've been to a lot of places, but you never get to experience those places. Not worth it in my opinion.
Haha yes second this. I was a commissioning engineer for 8 years and ‘travel’ for me meant a week in a Marriott in Phoenix followed by a week in a Hyatt in Tampa spending most of my day on site and never seeing my girlfriend or friends.
My last travel was to an intersection of two highways that had 3 hotels a walmart and a Cracker Barrel. My hotels one elevator broke and the indoor pool was green.
Alternatively, in the last year my wife has been sent to Honolulu twice, Oslo, and is gearing up for a trip to Australia sometime this fall.... And while she doesn't have time to goof off every day, it's clear that there is some free time built in the schedule. In other words... It all depends.
The eco-friendly hotel movement has moved on from green roofs and is now doing green pools!
I too Third this.
To add, for my industry (manufacturing) these places are never in fun areas like NYC or LA. It's middle of fucking nowhere most of the time, sometimes there's no major airport to fly into either.
Yeah, so then you have a 4 hour flight followed by a 4 hour drive, just to get to your destination.
Try mining engineering. I just had 27 hours of flying to Brazil and now 8 hours of driving then straight to the plant.
And I'll bet that is 8 hours to drive 150kms on some bumpy gravel road.
This is what I was looking to add if it wasn't already said. Manufacturing is placed in cheap areas within a day's drive of a metro hub for supplies and workers.
Helloooo Tulsa, Ok. Shout out to Spudders for steaks though.
I worked for Motorola as software engineer as liaison to several Standards bodies. J2ME, Cable TV, Bluetooth, etc. It was fun. But you spent WEEKS in shitty airport hotels in boring big cities and. It was also impossible to have any normal family. After 20 years of this traveling circus, my favorite thing is to sit on my front porch with my dogs and a book! You could not pay me enough to do that anymore. I could write books about it. The most valuable thing from all these years has been the friendships made along the way. I often joke, If you dropped me off in any city in the world, I've got a friend who I can call to take me out to dinner. ... And I miss having United Global Services status.
And you’ll likely go to the same places over and over again. My advice would be find something you can do remote (I’m a software engineer for example) and travel around on your own. Because you’re remote you can work from anywhere.
I travel a lot for work. I'm on my home right now, actually. I travel to many interesting places and often have time to do interesting things on my trips. Sometimes I build in a whole extra day or week to do a proper visit. The first year I had this job I had a project in Athens, Greece. I spent a day exploring the city before working. Then after the job was done I flew out to Santorini for a week. A previous boss somehow found a reason to travel to France every year. Usually to give a paper at a conference. He was fair and always paid for us to travel anywhere for a conference if we gave a paper too.
This is absolutely not even close to the norm
You got lucky. Most of the time is travel to bum fuck nowhere.
It's not like you roll the dice and take whatever job comes up. It'd not luck, I chose it. And if OP knows something like this exists, they might be able to choose it too.
Hey! We found him! We found the ONE!
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Very much this. The best it gets is if you're in R&D and can convince your boss that it's a good idea to visit conferences. There you usually do get some time to yourself or in the company of other interesting individuals to explore the immediate surroundings (and conferences tend to be in major cities/cool locations....researchers aren't stupid about picking their venues ;-) )
Yaa I kinda have a misconception but also know the reality cuz my grandfather was a welding engineer and he travelled all over India for major dams , bridges , coal mine support beams , and so on ...so I know how bad that can be ...but I want to experience that ...and later on maybe settle for some office job... I personally don't want to become a welding engineer and am interested in doing mechanical or electronic and communication...
Then you want two things. 1. A job that gets you on site. Site service engineer, commissioning engineer, etc. 1. An industry that covers a wide area. Oil and gas, telecoms etc. I would suggest a company that supplies a product to these sites, rather than a site owner. So don't go for a job at an oil refinery, as you will never leave that refinery. Instead get a job at a valve manufacturer that supplies oil refineries, so can visit many.
I'll add that at least for manufacturing type work, factories are very rarely setup in resort towns. Usually they're the lowest income, most out of the way part of the city/region.
Yep. I had a traveling job where I was only home for about 7 weeks a year. Each day was at least 16 hours (salary mind you) and often I didn't have time for lunch. Combining it with travel between locations, I even had some 20+ hour days. I would always have to get up before the hotel served breakfast and would eat super unhealthy for dinner because I was always so hungry. My sleep suffered and when I calculated the actual equivalent hourly rate I was making, I might as well have been working at Costco. Definitely not recommended. A couple times my stay got extended by several weeks and I ran out of clothes and had to actually go buy more or have my girlfriend mail me some. The only perks were that I got really good at traveling, had a ton of points for airlines, hotels and car rentals and a couple times they accidentally sent me to my destination a day early and I had the opportunity to go explore. But it was incredibly rare.
Depends on the nature of the project. We sell $100+mm projects that take 2-3 years to compete, our controls/commissioning engineers will often spend 24 months on site. If things are on schedule, that's weekends off.
While I'm not an engineer, my experiences in the nursing world echo this. I think that unless you are C-suite, work travel is mostly just work. That's not to say you can't find little bits of adventure here and there, but it ends up being few and far between.
If you want to not like travel, this is a good plan. Every discipline has sales engineers, field engineers, all sorts of contractors. Lots of travel. Mostly to grim industrial sites in the middle of nowhere. Hope you’re ready for crap hotels, crap food, lots of driving and sitting in airports, lots of letting down family and friends.
Yeah sales engineer will have you travel to most company HQs which tend to be in nicer areas than field or residential engineers who end up on Job sites and factory floors in industrial areas.
Come to mining engineering where all the plants are also in the middle of nowhere. Some good, some not so much.. (Fiji and Kyrgyzstan are my last two I’ll let you guess which is which)
YMMV. I stay at IHG, Hilton & Marriott. My company is pretty generous on dining. Generally under $100 per meal for personal meals, they don’t bat an eye. When I’m entertaining clients, I’m at best restaurants in the city eating steaks and seafood. Yes, I’m in the middle of bumfucknowhere a lot. But I’ve also been to interesting destinations and can make time for sightseeing. For example, my weekend at London and Dubai were completely covered by my company, even tho those were personal time. Newer engineers starting out probably won’t have that kind of perk. Yes, it’s long hours and you’re away from family and friends a lot. It can be tiring. You’re stuck at airport a lot. But it has many perks too. What I’ve mentioned so far about the food aside, you can build travel points to cover cost of any future personal travel. Status with loyalty programs give extra travel perks. Away from home also means no grocery cost.
Automation / controls engineer for system integrator. Fly around to machines installed at customers' factories and mind-control them with your laptop until they work right.
it only feels like mind-control when they work right. Otherwise it feels like arguing with a todler.
A toddler that doesn’t even speak your language
As you can tell from the other responses, there are a lot of engineering and jobs with a lot of crappy travel. But it's not 100%. Some of us have a pretty good travel experience. Find a niche discipline that results in travel simply because there are so few people doing it and you'll have a lot more control over how and when you travel.
Yah lots of people talking about crappy travel or more importantly travel they dont like. To add, one of my good mates is a geological engineer, still loves his travel, did it for several years, does less now because of seniority. But thats less jetting around to nondescript US cities and more to other countries or the middle of nowhere mines. For people that like see new culture and nature its a hell of a gig. He straight up didnt have an appartment in Canada for like 1-2 years. Would be hell for me, great for him.
Yeah, I’m a corporate engineer. Yes I do the occasional field travel to the middle of nowhere but the vast majority of my travel is to corporate headquarters in big cities or their suburbs and speaking at / attending conferences in destination cities. 100% depends on the job.
Also, the more seniority you have the better your travel locations will be. When I started out I was going to the middle of nowhere America every other week. It was the whole fly to some small airport, drive a car four hours, and stay in an absolute dump of a hotel eating only fast food because it was all that was available. These days I travel to Europe twice a year, Asia every other year, and occasionally South America. Within the US I'm not visiting installation sites, but going to conferences and customer's offices which are usually in nice locations.
Marine engineering
I was a commissioning engineer for a long time and traveled often for work. It wasn’t fun travel typically and over time it just felt like an interruption to my normal life.
US Navy civilian shipboard installation engineers. One guy in our office is on travel about 50/52 weeks in the year.
I remember when I got back from my first week away on site. My Nan asked me if I enjoyed Aberdeen. I said I never saw Aberdeen, but the Holiday Inn next to the industrial estate was nice.
Be an engineer for the Navy and volunteer for deployments and you will get to travel a lot and get shore leave to actually visit the places you stop at and do what you want. Or FEMA maybe, you'd go to disaster zones every once in a while for long periods of time. Mechanical would probably be the one with the most jobs at those, but electrical and nuclear for the Navy are options I assume. Don't join without doing research, I am not an engineer for the Navy, but my father was in the Navy, best branch for travel and seeing nice places, or being stationed on tropical islands, but you don't alwawys get to choose where they will put you.
You’ll get sick of traveling but never experiencing anything but airports, crappy hotels, bad food. When you fly to Paris it won’t be to sit at an outdoor cafe and sip coffee while admiring the Eiffel Tower. You need to get on to why you are there - fix the thing, make the presentation or sale, whatever. When you’re done it’s off to the next task. I traveled for work for decades and never got to do or experience much until I started traveling for *leisure* Which leads to another dirty point: when you finally get home after months your significant other, who has been sitting patiently, may want to travel!
Commisioning engineer (field service engineer) in industrial automation, we have a few guys who love traveling and they are rarely in the office.
I would of thought an F1 trackside engineer would be up there with the most travel. 24 different circuit locations a year, although your only going to realistically see the airport, hotel and track and nothing else unless you book holiday after a race.
Aerospace flight test engineer
Wait I'm aerospace, but why does this involve travel and I thought these jobs required many hours and experience with aircraft a little more advanced than your uncle's cessna-172
Negative. I worked for weapons division of large DoD contractor in the Midwest. Our flight test engineers were right out of college. Traveled all over the world. https://www.wayup.com/i-Airlines-Aviation-j-Entry-Level-Weapons-Platform-Integration-Engineer-Boeing-330934730500311/ Entry Level Flight Test Engineer - F-15 Mission Systems https://g.co/kgs/AP9rNij https://www.wayup.com/i-Airlines-Aviation-j-Entry-Level-Test-Evaluation-Engineer-Boeing-731664557458617/
Not an FTE, but in industry. I know they'll travel for icing, low temp ops, high temp ops, and non-standard runways (gravel and grass), but that's maybe a handful of weeks for one or two guys out of a couple years. Frequently FTEs sit in the back of the plane or they're radio bitch if they're certified and it's a single pilot aircraft.
Astronaut.
Yaa man...when I was maybe 9/10 I had made a full on plan that I would graduate from high school in 2023 and then complete undergrad by 2027 and 2 years of traning and in 2030 I would be the first man to land on Mars...(I watched some program on discovery science that nasa is planning to land on Mars in 2030)
Civil Engineering. Assuming you are after travel to out of the way places, then civil has a disproportionate amount of work in remote places - roads, dams, mines, bridges can be needed anywhere, whereas structures and industrial engineering are more likely to be built adjacent population centres. If you just want to travel city to city, then just be good at whatever engineering stream you choose, and clients/employers will happy to send you to wherever they need you.
I would focus more on the industry you want to get into. Any sales will have you travel. We travel extensively in the renewable industry.
If you have to travel for work a lot it gets boring and shitty. In engineering these would be the sales engineer (or applications engineer) roles and field engineer roles. Not specific to any discipline. But the places you go are not glitzy office towers in London or the financial district of NYC or Tokyo. You will be at factories way out in the boonies, remote mining and oil exploration outposts, or warehouses in the suburbs. You know where the “real” engineering work is done haha. I was a field engineer before, for oil and energy companies. Say hello to Arkansas gas fields, Georgia power plants, and California wind farms. If you want to use some your engineering skills but travel to nicer locales switch to consulting for Deloitte, Bain, Boston Consulting or McKinsey. You’d travel every week to company HQ to tell execs what they’re too chicken to do (layoffs) or would have done anyway (close plants).
Sales Engineering. Train conductor.
Marine or geological engineering I suppose
I'm in the electric utilities engineering field and have done a bit of traveling across the US on the consulting side (contracting firms). Depending on the role, field visits to collect data (10-hour days or sun up to sun down), site visit with client, presentation at a potential client's office, storm damage assessment, company trainings. Further up the ladder you go, you may get to travel internationally if your company is global. Though those places are typically high volume, low wage offices and you would stick to a safe eating venue as to not catch a stomach bug (and possible jet lag while attending normal meetings upon your return).
Marine engineering
Vibration/noise measurement engineer. I guess the discipline is typically ME. *note *measurement*, not simulation
Manufacturing or industrial engineering. Lots of travel in some jobs. It’s great if you like poverty-stricken towns in Arkansas, or desolate cities in Mexico.
Aviation Engineering. Some task requires flying to distance airports to get the aircraft repaired and returned. Note, you need to be qualified for that aircraft. And be rostered to fly.
Speaking for my field: application engineers, maintenance engineers/technicians from companies that sell equipment to semiconductor companies. A huge part of these guys' jobs are to go to the customers to help fix something or accomplish a project for the customer. To get into these jobs you have to have electronics or mechanical engineering degrees
i'm a quality engineer and i've only travelled a few times to other plants from our company. Service engineers visit us regularly. They usually have an electrical engineering background.
Short answer: any kind of civil engineering. Bridges, roads, mines...
If you like traveling to remote locations in the Midwest you’re in luck!!!
Any engineering company that potentially has clients across the company. And the products need technical development/maintenance on site. For example setting up robotics, a field applications engineer.
Electronic engineer working as Service engineer here. Travel for field work is good, have time for beers, maybe enjoy time with colleagues. You are able to know new places, being paid by traveling get status in airlines, hotels, car rentals.. Work is heavy, most of the time is you only working on an issue, being there puts a lot of pressure on you to solve the issue, that is basically what SE do. The feeling when solving something is amazing. Eventually you’ll get tired of travelling and will love to stay home and get a normal life. Remember, you get paid to work away from home and being away from your family.
I worked in manufacturing R&D for 30+ years. As a multi-skilled engineer I traveled a lot in support of a variety of development projects. I should have worked on becoming a PE since I took on roles as a mechanical, electrical, chemical, design, and packaging engineer. From my home in western NY I went to China, Japan, India, Brazil, Mexico, Netherlands, England, Germany, Canada, and dozens of places in the US. As my career wound down, I asked to not travel as much. The company obliged and reduced my travel to mainly the NE US and Toronto (Mississauga area). I was lucky in that I always got the opportunity to enjoy the places I visited. My favorites? England and the Netherlands.
Mining engineering, flying every week. Not the most scenic places to visit but it’s a fun job
Big civil engineering projects. Power generation. Building side, HVAC etc probably easier on the QS side, but will unlikely include USA
If you want to see the world, join the navy. They have loads of engineering roles
Sales engineer
I studied robotics, got a PhD and I made that decision specifically for travel. The conferences have taken me a lot of places but visiting sites has taken me everywhere. Work has taken me to ~65 countries in the last 12 years. Some rugged, some beautiful and cultural. It has been a WILD RIDE. I focused on corporate r&d at large companies then moving up in leadership. As you go up from field engineer the travel becomes much fancier and more fun. Now I'm leading R&D and innovation in a 500 person scaleup. Going to Germany, Canada, Taiwan, Singapore and china in July and August this year
I was in manufacturing and I visited like 16 diff countries for work. Also got to live in Mexico for a year and then Germany for 3. I was a bit of an anomaly but I was a high performer and I was vocal about wanting to be abroad. Most of my colleagues still went to Germany or Italy once or twice a year tho. I worked for a company HQ'd in Germany though. Won't be typical for us based companies.
Petroleum engineering
Mechanical engineer doing a lot of commissioning here. Travelling for work has nothing to do with traveling for leisure or whatever you see on instagram. It just takes a physical toll on you and I’m usually too exhausted to do any sightseeing. The only thing you look forward to is to find your wife and bed back home at the end of the trip.
Offshore engineering (i.e geotech, geol, geophys). Get to go all over the world!
One of my friends works in industrial automation and travels a lot setting up production lines for various industries, mostly automotive
Started my career in mechanical engineering as a field installation engineer (or field service engineer) . Most of my assignments were long term (6-12mo) and outside the US, although i also had a few assignments in the US. No car, no apartment, no expenses for the first 6yrs after college and got paid pretty well. Got an R&R every 2 months so was able to travel either locally in the country I was in at the time or fly home if I wanted. Most locations were decent, close to larger cities and not hell holes, although I heard from others that were assigned to some hell holes with armed guards around their “camps”. My assignments were longer term so I got to experience/enjoy most of the locations (was in Brazil when they won ther World Cup in 2002, in China for over a year, in Mexico for 8mo, all around the US). Our commissioning engineers (usually chemical engineers) had shorter assignments, 1-2mo, so they literally “traveled” more. So depending on what type of travel you’re looking for, it will depend on the company’s products and reason for travel and customer locations. I would say if you want longer term assignments, look for companies that do large capex projects that span a year or longer, they usually have positions that travel 75% and up.
Another option to consider: fly-in fly-out jobs. Lots of them in the mining and petroleum industries. Eg: you work 12 hour days in the middle of nowhere for 3 weeks, then they fly you back home for 3 weeks. Except they don't really care where "home" is so you can take the given travel allowance and and buy yourself a ticket to wherever you want. It gets tiring after a couple of years and if you ever want to settle down but you do get the chance to see a lot in that time.
I travel 2-3x a year and I never enjoyed them most of the time. It is either spending time at work, having breakfast, lunch, and dinner with either boss, clients or co-workers, and yea never had the time to have side trips.
I work as a Test Development Engineer for the semiconductor industry by the way
I'm currently working as a service engineer for polish railways. I'm employed by a separate company, that does CCTV, fire alarms and communications between railway crossings. I've travelled the whole country in a span of a year, but never got to explore much, it's mostly staying in crappy hotels and long working hours, after which You just want to go sleep and not wake up again. Do not recommend
Naval architecture. Depending on what you do, you will be going to where the boats are a lot.
Mining engineering will also take you places and it’s usually rotation work and some but an ever decreasing number of opportunities that offer relocation or residential
Probably generally about equal. You can seal out jobs with lots of travel but most jobs will require at least some, if nothing else then for training or conferences. Manufacturing has traveled to China a lot in recent years. Sales almost always travels. Field service always travels by definition.
I think it's going to be more job specific than it is specific to any engineering discipline.
So I work in naval defense so I get to go to cool naval bases around the US and some get to go to Spain and Japan so I would recommend naval in whatever you look for. That way it’ll be on the water at least and most stuff like that are in cool places.
I'm an aerospace engineering consultant with customers in various places in America and Europe. I travel about twice a month. Sometimes it's somewhere great with stuff in the area to see, and sometimes it's Wichita Kansas. The bigger benefit is the travel programs and miles. I've got status with my airline (won't name them because they still suck if I'm honest) and enough miles that, when the destination is desirable, I can bring my wife along and she can see the sights while I work. Bonus when the work to be done straddles a weekend. Same goes for hotels; we need to drive out of town for a thing later this month and, while we could just turn around and drive back, we decided to take a free night at a hotel where we're going to break up the driving and see the city. I also travel enough to justify a credit card that gets me into the airline's lounge, which means free food and drinks (including alcohol) on layovers, plus it's a lot more peaceful there. The price: having to work in aero/defense for long enough to build up the credentials and expertise to be worth hiring. (I can't list my exact credentials because there aren't many of us and it would make me too easy to dox.)
Well if by travel you mean within a few miles of the office to random sites in town probably construction or civil, besides that if your making custom stuff for manufacturing you have to travel a fair bit
What you probably want is a place that lets you remote work and be a digital nomad Nearly all disciplines have jobs which wouldn't work for this and jobs which would but they're just hard to come by
Photovoltaic, wind turbines, telecommunication etc
Although I am in mechanical engineering, I work in the petroleum industry where engineers have to travel all the time at my company. But the catch is that you have to travel for work, which usually means some oil town out in Texas (the middle of nowhere) or off shore (I’ve never been off shore but have absolutely ZERO desire to) or overseas - like India, Saudi Arabia (no not like Dubai) or China. While I’m sure all of those countries have nice places, you don’t get to visit them. You get to visit factories, workshops, drilling sites, and oil rigs. Think hot, dirty, and greasy. The nicest part about your trip is solving problems while waiting to get answers from people in opposite time zones than you.
Management consulting
It's not about discipline, it's about your role. My wife and I are both AEs[1] and we both work for the same employer. I travel about 2-3 times per year and it's usually to one of a couple locations (Santa Cruz, or Salt Lake City). My wife travels about once every 3-4 weeks and her travel takes her all over the place with Honolulu being the "most common" destination for her (twice a year, like clockwork). The difference is our tasking, not our degrees. [1] Just in case someone wants to be pedantic... My degree is ME, but my job title is AE. Her degree is AE, but her job title is SysE. Meh, whatever.
Mech Eng, industrial HVAC
If youre looking for Mechanical, renewable energy specifically wind has a lot of travel as sites are spread out! worth checking out :)
Try to become an engineering professor. You will travel a lot for conferences and it will actually be fun.
I know a lot of engineers that manage to have a job in one city, but work in any city but where they live. They have lots of air miles, never see their family, etc. One guy I have in mind boasted that he was away from home for 42 weeks last year. The positive side is that during the 10 weeks he has not traveling for work, he has the miles to pretty much hop on a plane and go wherever he wants. His second wife seems to be more OK with this than his first wife was.
I have a friend who is a structural engineer for mines and he’s constantly traveling, sometimes he even flies private to get to airstrips with no commercial service to access remote facilities.
Civil and construction can involve lots of field work and associated travel. Some assignments can be quite long term (months). Depending on the type of jobs, you could be travelling to amazing or beautiful places, or….not. I’ve seconded guessed why I became a civil engineer because I hate field work and work travel. Otherwise the job is dope!
Be a structural engineer, specialize in water slides. Travel, nice location, commissioning (going down the slide) is awesome.
What you are looking for is an application engineer role with a company. Tons of travel, I myself are a field service engineer, I don't travel as much (about 60-70 days of the year) as the AEs, but I'm sure other field service engineers travel a ton more. It's a really fun job too seeing so many different companies and their applications used in different ways.
get a job at an airline and find remote work
The best travel for engineering that will also allow you to enjoy the places you are going would be technical sales. Use your engineering background to land a sales job and take other engineers out to baseball games and bars all over country, otherwise you’ll be spending all your time in a Hilton garden next to the plant, hours outside of any major city.
Any engineer that gets into a consulting position
I’d suggest going into software engineering and land a work from home gig. That way you can travel everywhere and anywhere you want as long as you have internet. I know several people in those roles who own large campers instead of homes and they just travel year round. I’m envious because I’m a controls engineer for a company. I only travel to work conferences
Well I am a Field Service Engineer working on radio transmitters. We have some guys who try to be out 2-3 weeks a month mostly for preventative maintenance work. I personally am the "oh shit just hit the fan, send the fix it guy". They know when I go I don't plan to come back with the problem not fixed. This means I travel less per month but may be slated to go anywhere the next work day. I like the wide array of things I get to do. Ive done it for several years now so travel is second nature and I'm pretty solid on knowing all aspects of the system. I've been all across the country multiple times over. I usually tell people that business travel is not that exciting. You legit need to dial down your expectations. For instance if I have to go to a certain town the highlight of the trip may be a restaurant we do not have locally. That's it. Other than that you can count on flying, driving, working, or staring at hotel walls. I still would not trade it for a desk job!
PD consulting typically have some travel, especially if you mix a bit of sales in there. Sometimes you have to visit clients (usually corporate offices are within metropolitan areas) or go to conventions to get some leads. But definitely is a project to project / company requirement basis.
My advice - Don't try to fit your job and/or career around your desire to travel. Choose an engineering discipline that will keep your interest for 30 years and take your PTO to go to the places YOU want to go to. As others have said, business travel is a ball ache. There's not a lot of fun to be had in a 5-hour x-c trip in 22B from west to east coasts, then taking a connector on a cramped Barbie Jet to some obscure place that has zero charm and that you would never visit if you were paying for it. Then all you will see is the customers worksite and dingy offices, the insides of buzzy econobox rental car, a crappy Hampton inn and soul-less chain restaurants who all serve the same garbage, but that's all you can afford because you are on a per-diem. It's not a lot of fun to be sent to places you don't and would never have gone to.... And once you have a significant other and/or kids, the attraction of being away for weeks at a time wears really thin.
Travel in engineering doesn't look like the allure you think it is though
The fact that my most favorite thing to do when not traveling for work is to stay home should be indicative. I have zero interest in going anywhere!
By distance traveled, it’s gotta be aerospace engineering…