Production Engineer

Production engineering is essentially a subset of mechanical engineering. Sometimes known as manufacturing engineering or industrial engineering, it is a combination of manufacturing technology, engineering sciences with management sciences.

The ultimate goal of the job is to ensure the production process runs smoothly in the most economic way. To succeed in this role, you need to have wide knowledge of engineering practices to facilitate and optimise flow. While your involvement in design work may be limited, you need to be technically sound to feedback to design engineers on improvements that can be made on the concepts, from a production point of view.

You need to be able to scale and manage human resources so that the production flow is smooth with minimum disruption, for any downtime can be very costly for the company. Excellent communication skills is imperative, as you need to liaise with personnel of different levels, namely management (to report production status), design engineers, as well as line operators.

Production in large companies like Apple usually runs 24/7 due to the large volume of products they need to manufacture and deliver to the market. Depending on the company policy, you may be required to work on shifts.

Your reward = fixed pay + annual bonus + job satisfaction (that money can’t buy!)