What is the role of a design engineer in electrical field?Serious answers please!?
Asked by erin
I am an electrical engineering graduate looking for a good job abroad.I have studied CAD after my graduation.So I would like to work more in this field.I think working as a design engineer is better for me.So I would like to know the job details of a design engineer?And what are the skills needed for this job? Also what are the other jobs relating to CAD field for an electrical engineer?i am really confused about my career..So please help me Advance thanks

Best Answer:
Your aspirations are to be appreciated,but you need to mention specific CAD tool(s) you are proficient in, there are so many Electrical CAD tools available and what is the specific sub-domain: Analog, Digital,Power Electronics, Electro-mechanical or is it Electrical infrastructure grid you imply.Design knowhow is a knowledge quite different from simply being able to utilize a CAD tool. That said, if you are looking for a Design assignment that you can do over a period of 3 to 6 months I can provide you one to enable yourself test your mettle and get ahead. Can you clarify: differentiate Quartz crystal from a crystal oscillator and how programmable oscillators are realized and provide for frequency control ?

You should have studied mechanical engineering instead because it is all CAD and designing.
Answered by Mohammad

It is different for electronics engineers and electrical engineers. I hope you mean the latter. If so, you will probably start out using CAD to draw routing for circuits, locations of switches, panels, lighting etc. You will also be responsible for determining wire sizes, circuit loads etc and creating the charts on the blueprints. You do all the footwork and make sure everything works and meets local codes. Basically, you will be doing all the work while the architect gets all the credit...lol JK. Actually, the architect gets to choose all the fixtures and appliances you will be doing the charts and calculations for so he does do something...hehe
Answered by Lloyd G

I am a Canadian EE working in LA. I design state of the art DSPs and the like for the professional audio industry. A big problem we have with a lot of engineers outside of the US, Canada, UK or Australia is they tend to have no practical experience. We have one female Indian engineer working as part of our team. She is good for writing assembly language code for the microcontrollers. But if she needs a cable to test a function on the microcontroller, she is helpless. In India and many other Asian countries you have several technicians for every engineer. In the USA you may have one technician for every 5 engineers, if that. You have to do the simple stuff yourself. And you learn that not through a course but by building stuff at home for the fun of it. We never hire engineers, other than this one as a programmer, unless they have built stuff themselves for the fun of it and for the learning experience. Even a project from Nuts & Volts magazine will do. So unless your school required you to do hands on work where you did technician's work and actually build stuff yourself US companies are a lot less likely to hire you. US employers cannot offer the the kind of lower skilled helper you may be used to in India. As an electronics engineer myself, I spend as much time at my work bench as I do in my office. And just this last week I spent it assembling a very sophisticated SMT PCB with over 300 SMT parts myself. Because for the first article, I can build one faster that it takes to document it so a technician could build one. Besides, the two technicians in our engineering department are all too busy documenting test procedures for the production department anyway. So I fabricate it myself. Part of my work last week involved using sheet metal fabrication equipment and machine tools as well out in the machine shop. That is what we expect from our engineers here. We expect them to be about 1/3 backwoods hillbilly mechanic. Like the guys who dropped out of high school and who make NASCAR racers hit 240 MPH. And I spend about 1/3 of my time doing CAD schematic capture and printed circuit board design work on the computer.
Answered by Chuckles