Alternative Career Pathways

The engineering and technology professions offer excellent opportunities for employment and career advancement in Canada.  Depending on your background, your academic credentials and experience may lead you to a career as a licensed engineer or alternatively they could lead you to a successful career as a professional applied science or engineering technologist or technician.

Many new arrivals to Canada who are internationally trained engineers become licensed and find employment directly related to their field of work.   However, this is not always the case as licensure as a professional engineer may require additional academic training which could take several months or years to complete.   Another option is to consider choosing an alternative career pathway based on your existing skills that could provide more immediate employment with minimal or in some cases no additional academic training.

When considering which pathway is right for you it is important to note that skills and experience gained in one engineering discipline often have application in other disciplines.   If you have international training or experience in engineering, applied science or technology there are literally hundreds of alternative occupations where your skills may immediately be applied.  You should consider all your options and discover which pathway or pathways might result in your successful employment in the shortest time possible based on your skills and experience.

Discovering Your Pathway

This website is designed to help you determine where your skills fit within the engineering team and to help you discover alternative pathways to a broad spectrum of careers in the engineering and technology professions.

To get started, it is important for you to be aware of each of the specific disciplines in engineering and technology, the professional requirements for each, how they relate to one another, and career information that can help you chose your pathway.

A list of engineering and technology disciplines in which you may find work is provided below.

The Disciplines

The discipline names below are convenient descriptions of general fields or areas of study and/or practice which engineering-related professional and regulatory agencies in Canada have chosen to recognize, allowing them to more easily categorize their memberships. Practitioners generally seek education and training within these broad areas, but may well combine two or more if specialized expertise is needed.

The Trades tend to use job functions as their discipline names, while Engineering and Technology discipline names are usually related to educational program titles.

There are close general parallels between the Discipline names for Engineering and Technology, but they do not always match: some disciplines in Engineering may have different names in Technology. For example, Electrical Engineering includes the field of electronics, but Electronics Technology is recognized separately from Electrical Technology.

To begin discovering your pathway choose from one of the options below.

The National Occupational Occupation is the authoritative resource on occupational information in Canada. It is used daily by thousands of people to understand the jobs found throughout Canada’s labour market.

*Les termes GÉNIE et INGÉNIERIE sont des marques officielles appartenant à Ingénieurs Canada.