Engineering Careers, Decoded

A clear, candid look at today’s engineering job market—what’s real, what’s noise, and how students can evaluate roles, companies, and early‑career opportunities with confidence.

 The New Rules of Engineering Work

An inside view of how engineering roles are shifting with AI, hybrid work, and new collaboration models, and what these changes mean for the skills and habits that matter most.

Engineering Paths You Haven’t Considered

A Tour of Alternative and Emerging Engineering Careers—from small‑company innovation to patent law to fast‑growing technical fields students may not yet have explored.

Adding Value in an AI-Powered World (What Gregorian Monks and Modern Engineers Have In Common) – Work has been revolutionized throughout history.  The printing press replaced scribes.  Digital computers replaced human calculators.  Word processing replaced typists.  Yet with each revolution, new opportunities to add value arose.  In this session, we’ll hear from professionals who see AI being incorporated into engineering workflows, and learn strategies for adding value and managing your career. 

From the LabBook to the Rulebook: Careers in Public Policy, Ethics, and Law – Graduate training prioritizes producing new science, yet many of the most consequential decisions about how that knowledge is applied occurs outside an academic setting. In this session, we’ll hear from engineers who have a passion for technology’s impact on society. The discussion reframes these roles not as departures from science, but as positions where research training is applied to shape standards, regulations, and ethical frameworks to support institutionalized decision-making across industry. The session will clarify what these careers look like in practice, how graduate training translates into insight, with a focus on how students can prepare for these roles without abandoning their technical foundations.

Keynote with John Cioffi – Successful wide use of innovation requires significant effort well above the research and development required to develop new ideas into commercial promise.  This talk relates the author’s experiences in broadband internet access and advances to continuing wide expanding commercial use over the past few decades.  Attempts are made to generalize the experience into a few suggestions that may prove helpful to others considering such endeavors, particularly those emanating from an academic origin but entering commercialization through a small company’s founding.