The engineering skills that allow someone to design dams, highways, space shuttles, oil rigs, and computers also allow an individual to create their own profitable business and seek out a niche in the market. This is because many of the strength of a quality engineer, such as intelligence and persistence, will help an individual to understand customer demand, market share, and how to become a successful start-up.
Many engineers have turned away from graphs and charts in order to turn their attention to starting their own business. Five of the most successful entrepreneurial efforts proved the switch from hard hat to business hat is capable of being achieved. If these stories inspired you, remember that there is nothing stopping you from making a significant change in your life either. If you want to take the first steps toward a rewarding career, then perhaps it is time to consider returning to school. In this day and age, the prospect of going back to school doesn’t necessarily need to involve getting a dorm room and attending lectures. Most degrees can be earned online, even graduate degrees such as a Master’s Degree in Engineering Management. All you have to do is keep your eyes open, and stay motivated and optimistic.
From Early Beginnings
Steven Reid claims that he had been working for himself for a very long time. As a teenager her preferred to be his own boss as a yard worker rather than take an hourly position at a retail store. Once he graduated from the University of Alabama with an engineering degree, he realized that he did not want to be what he called a “one dimensional” engineer. As such, he left his job at an Atlanta firm because he could not make long-term decisions for the company and started his own business, Industrial Environmental Systems. Now he calls the company’s shots as they produce stacks, pollution and noise control, and ductwork.
School and Work
Sometimes it is not the established engineers who create their own business. University of Michigan freshman Carolyn Yarina realized that her work in school could easily transfer over to the real world. She graduated and opened the company CentriCycle, designing centrifuges that would be helpful for basic medical tests in underdeveloped nations. Yarina and her co-founder got the idea from a survey that a University of Michigan club, M-HEAL, sent to clinics in the developing world and asked them what devices they would like to see. They took their technology to a prototype phase after multiple trips to rural India. CentriCycle operates out of the U.S. until the company finishes product development and fundraising. The devices will be marketed in India in 2014.
From Heart to Heart
Doug Bernstien likes to tell people that he should have died years ago. He was born with a heart defect with only a two percent chance of survival. Luckily, Bernstein beat the odds and graduated from Carnegie Mellon’s engineering to found Peca Labs. He chose the entrepreneur route in order to ensure that his ideas could become reality. This start-up seeks to provide the heart valves for surgeries that would correct defects and provide life for young children.
Seeing the World
Andrew Mang visited Uganda and was dismayed by the nation’s poor access to water. Inhabitants of some villages had to walk five kilometers to find a pump. When he graduated from Duke University, he entered into an entrepreneurial competition known as the Start-Up- Challenge in which he attempted to create a hand pump that could deliver water in underdeveloped nations at a low cost. He had to find sources of funding since many investors did not think the work would be financially sustainable. Instead, he founded the company Aswanet in order to produce the pump design and raise money, hoping to one day get over a billion dollars for production to twenty-one countries.
From Small Beginnings
The forty-story World Trade Tower in Noida, India, will be twice the height of the next-tallest building in major cities like Delhi. This project was taken on by Sankey Prasad, a civil engineer who turned to entrepreneurship by opening his own firm called Synergy Property Development. Prasad did so just in time, for the past ten years has seen a property boom in India. Synergy has developed over one hundred million square feet of buildings, including parks, malls, colleges, hotels, and hospitals for dozens of cities in India.
About the Author: Joshua Turner is a writer who creates informative articles in relation to business. In this article, he describes a few successful engineering projects and aims to encourage further study with a masters of project management online.