Question: hello ED, whats the difference feel like from being a bartender at a football ground compared to being an aerospace engineer?

Edward Taylor answered on 9 Mar 2013:

Hiya Carl,

The difference feels really big! As a bar tender I was serving the public, with a huge mix of characters as you can probably imagine! This was at times fun but after a while it really just became repetitive. I was doing the same thing every time I worked there, with maybe 3 different mini jobs to do each day. After a while it became really boring, and the trouble was there was no other area to move into really, I had very few options to advance my career and was stuck. That’s fine for some people and its a perfectly good job, but I wanted more and it wasnt for me.

As an aerospace engineer no two days are ever really the same, I am always doing different work because the projects I am working on are always progressing until we have finally checked and built the product. This month I am working on the helicopter in my profile, but next month I might be working on designing a ship, or controls for a missile! It can be really exciting being involved in the design of something too, seeing something I helped build flying in the air, I get a huge sense of achievement which I never got as a bartender. This career also has lots of opportunities for progression in lots of different directions. Do I want to specialise and get really good at a certain type of engineering, or do I want to become a manager and boss people about, maybe I want to be the guy that goes and talks to pilots to find out what they need next. The possibilities are endless.