What it’s really like to work for a small engineering firm?
Big firms offer prestige – and top starting salaries – but small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can often give you a much broader engineering experience.
It’s one of the biggest decisions you can make when starting your engineering career: do you want to join a big corporate company with hundreds of other graduates or a small firm where you might be one of just a handful of engineers?
The likes of BAE Systems and Jaguar Land Rover offer a lot that small firms usually can’t, including extensive graduate training schemes where you move around the company, state-of-the-art facilities, a top starting salary and a chance to work on some of the biggest engineering projects going.
But working for an SME can in some ways put you closer to the engineering itself. You’re not a small cog in an admittedly exciting machine: you’re thrown straight into being a vital part of the company’s operation.
Larger firms think more about the big picture of integrating components to create a system that fulfils the design brief, working for years or even decades to solve the main problem.
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