Reason #28: Promotion Means Leaving Mechanical Engineering

The raise that actually changes your life comes with a new badge. It moves you away from mechanical engineering. By year seven you are smoothing supplier drama, shepherding ECO gates, and babysitting packaging drop tests so a DV/PV pack can crawl through approval. You spend more time in status decks than in design, see Reason #9.

The organization pays for what protects revenue and schedule, not for the quiet correctness of a tolerance stack. So the ladder tilts toward roles that own customers, calendars, and headcount. Program management finds you because you already run the shaker queue and the UL retest calendar. Product management is the same move with a market attached: requirements, tradeoffs, launch dates. Operations pulls you because you live on the floor and can translate a polymer creep hiccup into throughput. Technical marketing hires you to turn specs into positioning and to make a demo survive a sales call. Business development likes that you can read a drawing, price a BOM, and still carry a room. Consulting wants the same skills with a savings guarantee on a slide. None of that is mechanical engineering, see Reason #14 and Reason #16.

Geography helps the drift. Plants pick zip codes; customers pick the map. Operations, product, and program roles can sit nearer headquarters or the market and farther from the cell that needs your badge to clear an ECN. If you want a different city or a ceiling that finally moves, you follow the jobs that live off the floor. See Reason #20.

You will tell yourself you still “use your engineering every day.” In truth you move numbers, not metal. You negotiate lab time you no longer need, promise dates you do not control, and translate testing noise for people who will never see the rig. Is that flexibility or an exit?

You rise, the metal recedes, and the title that made you an engineer becomes a line in your bio, see Reason #15.

Reason #24: Your Applicant Pool Is Global

The hiring funnel for mechanical engineers in the United States is structurally crowded, see Reason #1. Labor-market totals show fewer projected openings than new graduates, and that baseline oversupply is further amplified by a steady inflow of H-1B workers in mechanical engineering occupations. Together, these streams create a persistently deep applicant pool for entry-level and early-career ME roles (Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS], 2025; National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2022; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [USCIS], 2025). 

Quantitatively, the BLS projects about 18,100 mechanical-engineer openings per year on average over 2024–2034 (BLS, 2025). In the latest fully consolidated NCES year, U.S. institutions awarded 36,224 bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering (AY 2020–2021), roughly two graduates for every projected opening (NCES, 2022). This two-to-one ratio exists before adding experienced candidates, internal transfers, or those re-entering from graduate programs: factors that further intensify competition (BLS, 2025; NCES, 2022). 

Global labor supply compounds the squeeze. In FY 2024, USCIS approved 8,010 H-1B petitions in Mechanical Engineering Occupations alone (2,714 initial and 5,296 continuing. The practical result is that the same requisitions attract domestic new grads, experienced MEs, and returning H-1B candidates who already know the employer’s systems, fixtures, routings, and paperwork. 

These conditions are visible on the shop-floor side of ME work. Day to day, junior engineers are evaluated on risk reduction rather than invention, moving holes and thread callouts to match supplier revisions, rewriting DFMEAs when a casting tolerance shifts, shimming test fixtures to preserve repeatability, and pushing ECOs through signatures. In an oversupplied market, managers can wait for applicants who already did these tasks in the same plant. As if not bad enough, internally, the pressure is reinforced by peer competition and by the lack of a protective professional guild, see Reason #6 and Reason #13.

You were never outmatched, only outnumbered.

References

Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. (2025). Mechanical engineers (Occupational Outlook Handbook). https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/mechanical-engineers.htm 

National Center for Education Statistics. (2022). Table 325.47: Degrees in chemical, civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering conferred by postsecondary institutions, by level of degree: Academic years 1959–60 through 2020–21. In Digest of Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_325.47.asp 

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. (2025, April 29). Characteristics of H-1B specialty occupation workers: Fiscal year 2024 (Annual report to Congress). https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/ola_signed_h1b_characteristics_congressional_report_FY24.pdf 

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. (2025, July 18). H-1B specialty occupations. https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-specialty-occupations

Reason #20: The Plant Picks Your Zip Code

Your offer letter came with a map, not a skyline. You drove past cornfields, smokestacks, and a rail spur, then parked beside a building that smells like coolant and cardboard. Before lunch, a supervisor asks if you can swing by bay three. This is mechanical engineering. You are hired to be near the thing as it becomes the product.

Other disciplines can float above the factory. An electrical or software team can design, develop, and ship from an air-conditioned office park two time zones away, surrounded by white-collar peers who speak in tickets and sprints. You live closer to the point of delivery. When a test fixture drifts out of tolerance, you tweak it so the data survives review. When the vendor’s motor shows up with a new flange, you adapt the mounting, update the keyway, move holes on drawings, call out threads, and rewrite the torque table so the build keeps moving. If a line stops, your phone rings at 2 a.m. The shop does the hands-on work while you route ECOs and CAPA rationales, which is exactly why you must be present, see Reason #16.

Oversupply makes the geography harsher. There are more mechanical engineers than attractive roles, so openings are where the plant is, not where you want to be. You take the job in a town chosen by rail, utilities, and tax abatements because you cannot negotiate for remote when ten qualified applicants will move tomorrow, see Reason #1.

Managers will say we are flexible, then schedule standups around the production shift. Proximity buys you credibility with technicians, which you need, but it also traps you in calendars and zip codes you never would have picked. Why would leadership pay for you to live wherever you want when the bottleneck is ten steps from your desk?

The irony is that the closer you are to shipping, the further you are from freedom. Your impact is real, very, very real, but the badge opens doors to the plant, not to a coastal remote policy. You can pick the job or the place. In ME, the place usually picks you.

Reason #11: Your Specialization Dictates Where You Live

As hard as establishing a specialization in mechanical engineering is, see Reason 8, another challenge that comes up is how that specialization quietly chooses your address. The first real job gives you a niche. After that, the niche gives you a handful of ZIP codes.

If you build your experience around airframe fatigue, you will look at Seattle or Wichita. If your résumé reads pipeline stress analysis, you will study Houston apartment prices and learn the Beltway by accident. If you do NVH on trucks, you will orbit Detroit and its satellites. Marine work lives on the coasts. You do not decide where to live. Your project list does.

This would be tolerable if it stopped at work. It does not. Your partner’s career, your parents’ health, your kids’ school district, your hometown friendships: they all become secondary to the employer that needs your exact sub-specialty in the one region that still funds it. You can want Denver or Raleigh or anywhere with mountains and decent coffee. The postings do not care. They ask for five years in your precise corner of the field and they expect you to show up where that corner exists.

The longer you stay in your niche, the fewer doors open outside of it. You become experienced, which means you are hired to repeat yourself. Switching cities often means switching industries, and switching industries often means starting over. Many mechanical engineers eventually solve the problem by leaving mechanical engineering, see Reason #28.

Mechanical engineering is marketed as flexibility. In practice, it behaves like a cluster map. You move to where the cluster lives, or you stop being an ME. The breadth that was supposed to free you ends up confining you to a few shrinking places on the map.

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.

Reason #1: The Field Is Oversaturated

Mechanical engineering is the most popular undergraduate engineering major in the United States, producing around 35,000 bachelor’s degrees every year, roughly a quarter of all engineering graduates (ASME, 2025; ASEE, 2019). The problem is that the jobs do not exist to match the diplomas. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 19,800 job openings for mechanical engineers are projected each year, and that figure includes replacements for retirees and career changers, not just newly created positions (Penn State, 2025). In plain terms, the country is minting nearly two mechanical engineers for every available job.

This imbalance defines the profession. Oversupply means employers can afford to be picky. They post “entry-level” jobs requiring three years of experience, they demand unpaid technical assessments, and they can discard candidates after multiple rounds of interviews because another stack of résumés is waiting. The outcome is not just fewer opportunities but worse opportunities. Many of the positions that do exist are technician jobs rebranded with the word “engineer,” offering low pay and little chance for advancement.

Other engineering fields do not suffer nearly as much from this imbalance. Industrial engineering is projected to add about 40,900 new jobs between 2023 and 2033, making it the fastest-growing core discipline. Electrical and electronics engineering will add about 26,200 jobs with a nine percent growth rate. Software engineering dwarfs them all with projected growth of 17 percent and job creation that far outpaces mechanical engineering (BLS, 2024; OnlineEngineeringPrograms, 2025). Mechanical engineering, by comparison, ekes out an 11 percent growth rate, most of it replacements, not new opportunities.

Graduates are left with a simple reality: far too many degrees are chasing far too few jobs. The prestige outsiders imagine is an illusion. Inside the profession, oversaturation strips mechanical engineers of leverage, depresses salaries, and blocks advancement. Mechanical engineering is not the gateway to opportunity that glossy brochures promise. It is a crowded line for a shrinking pool of jobs, where your degree guarantees only that you will have to compete harder for less.

References:

American Society for Engineering Education. (2023, October). Engineering and engineering technology by the numbers 2023. https://ira.asee.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Engineering-Engineering-Technology-By-the-Numbers-2023-27-October-2024.pdf

OnlineEngineeringPrograms.com. (2025, June 13). What are the fastest-growing fields in engineering in 2025? https://www.onlineengineeringprograms.com/faq/fastest-growing-engineering-fields

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2024, April 17). Mechanical engineers. Occupational Outlook Handbook. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/mechanical-engineers.htm

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2024, April 17). Software developers. Occupational Outlook Handbook. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm

OnlineEngineeringPrograms.com. (2025). Fastest-growing fields in engineering. Retrieved from https://www.onlineengineeringprograms.com/faq/fastest-growing-engineering-fields