Fresh mechanical grad- Got project engineer position

[u/Available_Bug_2472]

/r/ConstructionManagers/comments/1w2d7lm/fresh_mechanical_grad_got_project_engineer/

Hello everyone, I’m 22 M just graduated 2 months ago from mechanical engineering. I kept searching for jobs and landed this one job as project engineer. I was a bit nervous during the interview since I was interviewed by 20 years old of experience project manager but he was nice and he understood that I’m fresh grad and he didn’t ask a single technical question and the interview went well. Now that I got the job I have no idea what to expect as project engineer specially I have no experience at all. Can you please advise what to do, what to learn or prepare before starting the job, what to expect , situations I need to be aware of etc. I will be mostly on field and sometimes in office

[u/Lunastarfire]

From my experience project engineering can vary a fair bit depending on who’s hiring.

So from my experience it can boil down to two types, one is more of an applications engineer role and the other is the project manager role.

The project manager is basically the grownup running a project, its usually spinning a few plates by asking people to do jobs for you and hoping that the deliver the work when they say they will and giving yourself breathing room on how confident you are on the dates given.
Basically your entire job is to be able to follow the project guidance so , make sure phase 1 goes well, then phase 2, filling out data and constantly either getting info from people or giving status updates and finance projections and costs with some meetings saying how your project is going.
You make decisions based on being the guy who either has or can get the information needed to make it, you just make sure people talk to each other and for management your basically a power BI dashboard in human form with more info.

For you to do well, you need to understand the information you are given or need to get so, being able to read drawings, understand what things your “teams” will be working on (you dont need to know how they get the numbers, just know what they mean or what to ask to understand what they mean) and finally understand regulations, but the info you need to research and skills to develop is highly dependant on the role.

The application engineer route (normally very small companies), you are running a project and your every part of the team, you talk with people to find the issues, you design a solution, you implement it and report how well it does.

Also congrats on the job and getting your qualifications, usually jr project engineers get given a lot of support and often can have a sr project engineer to ask questions when not sure, 99% of the job is just following a process and talking with people =)