<p>I'm a VERY extraverted person and I NEED contact with people. I'm also very good at solving problems and I'm good with technology. Are most engineering jobs typically introverted jobs?</p>
<p>In short, any job is what you make it. Would say engineers are a different crowd of people compared to something like business.</p>
<p>No what I'm saying is will I be required to work alone all day in a typical engineering job or will I have contact with people?</p>
<p>Being extroverted is a very good quality to have as an engineer.</p>
<p>"Being extroverted is a very good quality to have as an engineer."</p>
<p>Why is it a good quality to have as an engineer?</p>
<p>That's such a broad question. Some jobs are definitely more team-oriented than others. When I was an intern at a traffic engineering consulting firm, people rarely worked alone. There were frequent discussions with colleagues on how to approach a certain problem, meetings with clients, conversations with sub-consultants, etc. On the other hand, I'm sure there are other jobs where you're working alone most of the day in your cubicle.</p>
<p>I don't know enough about all the fields and jobs out there to tell you what the norm is.</p>
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Why is it a good quality to have as an engineer?
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<p>You need to be able to communicate your ideas to others.</p>
<p>"That's such a broad question. Some jobs are definitely more team-oriented than others. When I was an intern at a traffic engineering consulting firm, people rarely worked alone. There were frequent discussions with colleagues on how to approach a certain problem, meetings with clients, conversations with sub-consultants, etc. On the other hand, I'm sure there are other jobs where you're working alone most of the day in your cubicle.</p>
<p>I don't know enough about all the fields and jobs out there to tell you what the norm is."</p>
<p>So then there are some extraverted engineering jobs? Are there a good amount of them or is it somewhat rare to find a job like that?</p>
<p>"You need to be able to communicate your ideas to others."</p>
<p>How do you do the quote?</p>
<p>Just about any engineering job can benefit from being extroverted. Like most jobs, those who are able to network will tend to find themselves in line for promotions more often and will make the most connections that can be used to help solve problems. Introverted engineers may be able to perform their task, but if they run into problems they are much more likely to have a hard time collaborating with others to solve it. In engineering especially, collaboration is the key, so being an extrovert is beneficial. I am unaware of an engineering job where this is not the case to at least some extent.</p>
<p>Yes there are some like that. A good amount? I'm not sure; my experiences have been limited to the construction industry.</p>
<p>You quote by typing [ q u o t e ] whatever you want to quote here [ / q u o t e ] , without the spaces of courses.</p>
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<p>Engineering is demographically skewed quite a bit towards introverts - that makes extroverts somewhat in demand, as there are many engineering jobs that introverts will avoid. In fact, there are far more jobs for extroverts than there are for introverts, despite the demographics of engineering. The reason for this is that all but the simplest designs will be team efforts, and eventually those designs will need to be presented and sold, and it probably helps if the manager is also an engineer and yet still able to handle talking to his subordinates. Well, that is one reason at least.</p>
<p>What the old joke:</p>
<p>How can you tell you're speaking to an extroverted engineer?</p>
<p>When he talks to you, he's staring at YOUR shoes.</p>
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Engineering is demographically skewed quite a bit towards introverts - that makes extroverts somewhat in demand, as there are many engineering jobs that introverts will avoid. In fact, there are far more jobs for extroverts than there are for introverts, despite the demographics of engineering. The reason for this is that all but the simplest designs will be team efforts, and eventually those designs will need to be presented and sold, and it probably helps if the manager is also an engineer and yet still able to handle talking to his subordinates. Well, that is one reason at least.
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</p>
<p>Why is it demographically skewed towards introverts? I look up articles online and they all said that engineering is geared towards introverts?Also are their certain types of engineering that are geared more towards introverts and some that are more towards extraverts.</p>
<p>I'm sure you'll find introverts and extroverts in almost any field you choose to look at. Also realize that no one is totally an introvert or totally an extrovert. People are always somewhere in between but with definite tendancies one way or the other. It can depend on the situation also.</p>
<p>So, to use a doctor as an example; an introverted doctor would have to "come out of his shell" to deal with patients effectively. Therefore, a potential introverted doctor who could not deal with people well might choose research or another profession all together. Or, he would appear to you, the patient, as an extrovert because he had to.</p>
<p>Engineers on the other hand can operate as introverts and do OK. They can become good engineers but, IMHO, will never be great engineers. An introverted engineer can be given an assigment and go into his office and work all day on it and never talk to anyone else. If he has a problem with his assigment, he goes to his boss and asks for help. A great engineer will take that assigment and discuss it with his peers, find the best solution, get help directly from the people that can help him without bothering his boss. A really great engineer will have the savy to find real problems before they become obvious, develope potential solutions and present them to their boss before they are an issue. The boss can then decide to pursue to issue or not. </p>
<p>As a retired engineering manager, I loved having the extroverted engineers on my staff; the introverted ones were more like advanced computing machines to me, good to have around but only usefull to a point.</p>
<p>HPuck35 writes "An introverted engineer can be given an assigment and go into his office and work all day on it and never talk to anyone else. If he has a problem with his assigment, he goes to his boss and asks for help. A great engineer will take that assigment and discuss it with his peers, find the best solution, get help directly from the people that can help him without bothering his boss."</p>
<p>Is that what a great engineer does? I thought those engineers were the ones that didn't know how to do it and wanted their co-workers to give them the solution! :)</p>
<p>Extroverted engineers are often in sales and, to some extent, in consulting positions.</p>
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[quote]
I'm sure you'll find introverts and extroverts in almost any field you choose to look at. Also realize that no one is totally an introvert or totally an extrovert. People are always somewhere in between but with definite tendancies one way or the other. It can depend on the situation also.</p>
<p>So, to use a doctor as an example; an introverted doctor would have to "come out of his shell" to deal with patients effectively. Therefore, a potential introverted doctor who could not deal with people well might choose research or another profession all together. Or, he would appear to you, the patient, as an extrovert because he had to.</p>
<p>Engineers on the other hand can operate as introverts and do OK. They can become good engineers but, IMHO, will never be great engineers. An introverted engineer can be given an assigment and go into his office and work all day on it and never talk to anyone else. If he has a problem with his assigment, he goes to his boss and asks for help. A great engineer will take that assigment and discuss it with his peers, find the best solution, get help directly from the people that can help him without bothering his boss. A really great engineer will have the savy to find real problems before they become obvious, develope potential solutions and present them to their boss before they are an issue. The boss can then decide to pursue to issue or not. </p>
<p>As a retired engineering manager, I loved having the extroverted engineers on my staff; the introverted ones were more like advanced computing machines to me, good to have around but only usefull to a point.
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</p>
<p>It seems like extraverted engineers are pretty damn rare to find then. Is that correct?</p>
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Is that what a great engineer does? I thought those engineers were the ones that didn't know how to do it and wanted their co-workers to give them the solution! </p>
<p>Extroverted engineers are often in sales and, to some extent, in consulting positions.
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</p>
<p>I'm sure you could find a position where you could do both sales and technical work though right, because I have a sales background.</p>
<p>Maybe I over simplified my statements in my previous posts. If you are given a problem you know how to solve, you just go do it. If you don't know how to solve it, one should think how they might solve it and then ask around if someone else had a similar problem and what their solution was. No sense reinventing the wheel all the time. If you are always asking how to solve it, then that's not good either.</p>