Engineering Career Field

A quality engineer works at St. Louis, MO area to improve product quality by introducing quality assurance programs and providing quality standards to companies that build industrial and consumer products. They help to keep the company's costs low by decreasing failure rates and also by building customer loyalty and product satisfaction. Quality engineers work with large manufacturing companies often in industrial settings all over the country. The majority of quality engineers, as with most engineering professions, are currently men .

Employment of quality engineers at St. Louis, MO area is expected to grow more slowly than average as many companies move their manufacturing operations to foreign countries; however, every manufacturing company will continue to have a need for highly skilled professionals to control their failure costs. Quality engineers who have an understanding of both industrial manufacturing and business practices should continue to see employment opportunities.

Drafters prepare technical drawings and plans used by production and construction workers to build everything from manufactured products, such as toys, toasters, industrial machinery, and spacecraft, to structures, such as houses, office buildings, and oil and gas pipelines. Their drawings provide visual guidelines, show the technical details of the products and structures, and specify dimensions, materials, and procedures. Drafters fill in details, using drawings, rough sketches, specifications, codes, and calculations previously made by engineers, surveyors, architects, or scientists. For example, they use their knowledge of standardized building techniques to draw in the details of a structure. Some drafters use their knowledge of engineering and manufacturing theory and standards to draw the parts of a machine in order to determine design elements, such as the numbers and kinds of fasteners needed to assemble the machine.

Almost half of all jobs for drafters were in architectural, engineering, and related services that design construction projects or do other engineering work by a contract for other industries. More than a quarter of jobs were in manufacturing industries, such as machinery manufacturing, metal fabrication, computer and electronic manufacturing, and transportation manufacturing. Most of the rest were employed in construction, government, wholesale trade, utilities, and employment services.

Employers prefer applicants who have completed postsecondary school training in drafting, which is offered by technical institutes, community colleges, and some 4-year colleges and universities. Employers are most interested in applicants with well-developed drafting and mechanical-drawing skills; knowledge of drafting standards, mathematics, science, and engineering technology; and a solid background in computer-aided design and drafting techniques. ...