Reason #8: Broadness Is a Liability

Mechanical engineering is advertised as the broadest degree. The pitch is that you can work in any industry, doing anything, because “everything is mechanical.” What they don’t tell you is that broadness is a trap. Employers don’t want someone who can do a little bit of everything. They want someone who has already done their very specific thing.

If your first job happens to be finite element analysis in ANSYS Mechanical, running vibration and fatigue loads on rotating equipment for the oil and gas industry, you had better hope your second job also involves ANSYS, vibration and fatigue, and rotating machinery in a heavy industrial setting. If instead the next opening is in Abaqus, analyzing thermal stresses on aerospace composites, your years of “experience” suddenly mean nothing. You are starting over as if you were fresh out of school.

Every career guide will tell you the same thing: the fastest way to advance in pay and seniority is to establish a specialization, to carve out a niche that makes you indispensable. Electrical engineers can spend an entire career mastering high-voltage systems or microchips. Chemical engineers can move from petroleum refining to pharmaceuticals with their process expertise intact. Software engineers who know Ruby on Rails, Python, or JavaScript frameworks can take that skill set to startups, Fortune 500s, finance firms, or tech giants. Their experience compounds.

Mechanical engineers? They fight to explain how their last job using SolidWorks on an HVAC duct system qualifies them to use CATIA on an aircraft bracket. The supposed broadness of their degree means their experience doesn’t transfer neatly, and every career move looks like a reinvention.

This is the bitter reality: broadness means disposability. It makes you look unfocused, even when you are trying to specialize. It forces you to restart with every career move. The “generalist” pitch is a lie. In the real world, the specialists win.