Jobs for the Major
How this major affects a job search
Let's be honest here. You either know what you want to do with your life or you're looking for a ready-made career. You're leaps and bounds ahead of so many of your friends. Maybe you should just skip the rest of the day and go to the beach.
Still here? Oh, well.
One downside is that you might find yourself locked into a specific way of thinking, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that when it comes to your goals. Industrial technology is an extremely specific major, more so than even many of the other tech majors. Your career path isn't exactly going to have many branches.
There are options, though. You might have something already in mind, and we say embrace that. But if you want a few more ideas, stick around. There's always room for a fallback position, and more knowledge has pretty much never been a bad thing throughout human history. So let's do this thing, and you can totally hit the beach later.
Common Career Fields
Sales Representative. Maybe you're less of an engineer and more of a people person. Maybe you discovered this three years into your four-year degree, and you're about to be stuck maintaining an assembly line. Good news. Some industrial technology majors find a counter-intuitive place on the supply chain: sales. With your command of the entire process, you can turn your sales into a fact-filled story, and with your people skills, you can get those commissions.
Safety Supervisor. They say that once you truly understand a thing, you see all the ways in which the thing can kill you. This is why we've never looked very closely at crocodiles. You can use your knowledge of the assembly process to keep workers from being sucked into the industrial machines, which is quite bad for you.
Industrial Automated Systems. This is probably the career you had in mind when you first heard of the major. This focuses around all of those incredible automated machines, the robots, that make up much of modern manufacturing. You can make them, fix them, maintain them. You can really do anything you like with them, except teach them how to love. Awww.
Consultant. Consultants are the catch-all of modern employment. Essentially, not everyone likes being tied down to one place of employment. They're more like cowboys, but with a lot less shooting of desperadoes and the like. When a company needs an expert, but doesn't have one on the payroll, you get the call. Chances are, you'll be the one telling them how to streamline their manufacturing process, probably by upgrading one or more of their machines.
Planner. Maybe you're a big picture kind of person. That's appropriate, considering the wide reach of the major. You would rather create the entire process, at least in theory, that takes raw materials to a finished product. You're the one designing the assembly lines, the one determining exactly what machines go where in the process. You're the mastermind of industry. Just don't go full supervillain on us.
Quality Assurance Technician. This is a fancy term for what used to be called "product tester." Your job will be to attempt to destroy a product. You're generally confined to stresses that it might conceivably face in regular use or in shipping, but beyond that, go nuts. You get to break stuff for a living, and when you do, it's not your fault. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal.
Time Study Analyst. Ever hear the phrase "time is money"? It's not meant literally. You can't give the 7-11 guy five minutes for a soda. Basically, time is a finite resource like any other, and wastes of time or inefficiencies cost a company some of this resource. Put simply, if you can make more stuff in less time, you make more money. A Time Study Analyst looks at the data of the production line for places where the process can be sped up. You make more stuff, the company makes more money, and everyone is happy.
Current unemployment of the major
9.0%Percentage of majors who get a higher degree after college
28%Stats obtained from this source.