What do they do?
Working in a power plant or developing software to improve electrical equipment are the primary tasks of an electrical engineer.
One specialising in this field can also work in steel factories, the railways, at construction sites or handle automated systems in which electricity supply and distribution plays a crucial role.
“There are tremendous opportunities for electrical and mechanical engineers — theirs are evergreen professions,” says Prasen Jit Pal, deputy general manager, engineering division, a PSU.
“Given the huge gap between demand and supply of power in India, there’s a lot of scope for more growth in the sector,” adds Pal. “Currently, our company has 30,000 MW of installed capacity, which is expected to almost double in the next seven-eight years. This, in turn, would attract investments of Rs 80,000 crore or so.” Which means still more jobs for electrical engineers.
Those wanting to enter the power or civil sector should go for electrical (power) engineering. Bhola Prasad, project engineer with RITES, a government enterprise, has been involved with work to bring light to hundreds of villages in India. “Every day, I would go on field visits and ensure that the power lines were set in accordance with rules. The work can be quite demanding as it involves a number of checks and verifications while work is in progress,” says Prasad.
Things can get quite hectic, says Pal, when a new power project is being carried out. “During the installation of a power plant, every engineer works extra hard,” he says.
“One must meticulously monitor the installation and commissioning of each piece of equipment. Things cool down during the operation phase, barring annual maintenance time.”
The power generation or distribution sector is not where all electrical engineers go. Many join allied industries like automobile or instrumentation, where massive manufacturing plants are run on power.
“There are two huge plants in our factory that are run on power and electrical engineers are required to ensure continuous supply of electricity to the plant and to fix any faults,” says Varun Anand, electrical engineer with Hero Motors, Manesar.
With each industry now driven by computers, electrical engineers can go in for software development, too. To create and enhance software, one ought to have a sound theoretical knowledge of electricity. This job calls for analysing procedural functions of engineering to do the software encoding.
Rajiv Garg, an electrical engineer from IIT Delhi, works at Mentor Graphics, an electronic design automation company, on ‘enrichment of software’ used for making chips by semiconductor companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. He says, “With technology advancing rapidly, the demand for electrical engineers has gone up steeply everywhere. A lot of work goes into the development and enrichment of equipment. It is first designed using software, then the design is optimised considering its utility, followed by its physical test.”
Another emerging area is green energy. “Whether it’s hydro power, solar power or wind energy, each sector will require electrical engineers. That’s why I joined the clean technology sector and will go back to it after doing my MBA,” says Shobhit Goel, an electrical (power) engineer from IIT Delhi and a student at ISB, Hyderabad.
source: HT Horizons
