Hi I Just did a pretty epic five hour livestream today here: I'll link it in at the end if you haven't seen it and like at least half a dozen people during this livestream asked me basically the same question: how do I get into electronics I want to become an engineer but I don't have a degree or I don't want to get a degree I don't have the math skills required I don't have the interest or I'm the Eevblog forum. The other day, someone on there asked about their career options because they didn't get the correct grades to get into university engineering degree and stuff like that. And what are the options can you get into electronics, become an electronics engineer in the industry without a degree? Well, the answer is yes, absolutely you can. Let's talk about it.

It's an interesting topic first of all. I'll talk about the specific grades of engineering education and then I'll get into towards the end how what things you can do to help get yourself a job, a career as an engineer in the industry with lesser or no qualifications at all. Now first of all, I've got to say this is highly specific to the type of job that you're going after, the country that you're in, the industry that you're in, and if you want to talk about your specific country, best place to do it is on the EEV blog forum. Link down below the thread for this video and I'm sure no shortage of locals will help you out.

Now the first thing here in Australia Basically anyone can be an engineer. Okay, you do not need formal qualifications in engineering. You don't need any qualifications at all to a call yourself an engineer or B be employed as a professional engineer. It's only if you want to join the Institute of Engineering Australia as which is our sort of official qualification body and register yourself as an engineer.

I Guess there are various grades in that, but basically hardly anyone in the electronics industry. this is just I'm talking about electronics in this video. It's different different forms of engineering, civil engineering. and you know.

build. No one's going to be letting you build a bridge or a skyscraper like with out your degree and without being a registered engineer and all that sort of stuff but electronics. It's pretty different. Here in Australia we have a very rich history of not givin a toss in true Australian fashion, not giving a toss about your qualifications or where you got your degree from.

All we care about is can you do the job? That's why in Australia it's It's very common. Once you've got your first job, your qualifications go right at the bottom of your resume that they go through. Can you do the job? If you've got these schools where if you work before, blah blah blah do you sound like a cool person? Do you know what other projects you're working on and they're by the way? Oh yeah. I've got a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering? Whoop-dee-doo That's how it works here in Australia, but other countries may vary the U.s.

In particular, there's been the very recent case about which I'll try to link in at the end, where in certain states in the U.s. you cannot even or you couldn't before this court case even call yourself an engineer. You couldn't even comment on any engineering matters without actually having formal engineering qualifications that are licensed in that state. And it gets ridiculous.

Now here in Australia, we've basically got three different levels of engineering education. or pretty much four, but only three that really matter for what we're talking about. One here here is your four-year bachelor degree, which entitles you to become a member of a full member of the Institute of Engineers Australia and you can call yourself an engineer. We'll talk about calling self an engineer in a minute, but on a light just fell down.

But here in Australia, it's not uncommon to see an engineering job err, which might state something like to be eligible for the member of institute of Engineers in Australia. That basically implies that you even need that four-year degree or you need any other equivalent qualification that entitles you to be a full member of the Institute of Engineers. But as I said, hardly any employer in Australia really cares about membership of the Institute of Engineers. It's just not a thing in the electronics industry, it's more for other our branches of engineering.

Now here's where we have to talk about the three different types of a official engineers. There's this international engineering Alliance thing and they've got these: Accords, the Washington called the Sydney Accord and the Dublin Accord. Now the Washington chord. It covers professional engineers ie.

with a four-year degree. and here's all the countries that are signatories to this: Australia Canada China Hong Kong India. There's not much EU in there. The United Kingdom's pretty much the only one is it in the United States.

So if you have a four-year engineering degree that's accredited under the Washington Accord, then in theory, you can go to any one of these countries and apply for in the case of Australia. For example, if you can go straight, you could apply for the Institute of Engineers Australia here because you're under the Washington Accord. So my qualification is from another country, but it's under the Washington Accord. Yes, you can apply as a graduate of the Institute of Engineers Australia and Bob's your uncle.

Then you can go on to become a professional engineer here in Australia and likewise for the Sydney Accord that actually covers three-year degrees or three years sometimes called associate degrees, which is a bit confusing as you'll see in a minute and that basically allows you to become officially an engineering technologist. But I Don't know anyone in the industry who actually uses this sort of terminology. I'm an engineering technologist never seen in job I'd never seen anyone claimed to have it on their resume. It's just an official thing that these official bodies actually do.

but that's what you can get with a three-year degree diploma, associate's degree in Engineering, and the Dublin Accord is basically a technician level two-year what we'd call like a trade certificate here in Australia. But technically, you're an associate engineer. It's not a thing here in Australia for electronics. Basically, nobody joins the Institute of Engineers Australia.

It's just not a thing, but all these sort of categories. they officially exist. so professional Engineer for years, engineering technologist three years, and engineering associate two years got it. So if you go into the Wikipedia article here for engineering technologists, those with eighth three year degree slash diploma, they actually extol the virtues that you are not stuck there.

You can rise above and actually lead engineers. And so basically anyone, especially here in Australia doesn't matter what qualifications you got, if you're good enough, you can become a professional engineer. And really, if you're an electronics technologist, if you're doing professional engineering work, call yourself a professional engineer, not an engineering technologist. And they do.

I Explained how Engineering Technologist is more applied engineering and then theoretical engineering which is in your four-year degree. And that's kind of how it works in your four-year degree versus say a three-year associate's degree or diploma. Three-year one is much more practically oriented, whereas your four-year degree is more mathematical and theoretical oriented. As I said, all of this framework exists, but it's not a theme really a thing here in Australia except in other branches of engineering.

it certainly might beaten, but not in electronics. Let us know what it's like in your particular country. incredibly common here in Australia to be and employed as an engineer. Either self-employed are employed by a large company and get that official title of engineer.

and hence you can call yourself a professional engineer with either a lesser degree or no degree at all. No qualifications in the field whatsoever. If you can get your foot in the door. At the end of the video, I'll tell you about how you can do that.

Believe it's kind of similar in the UK don't quote me on that to Australia but other countries like in Europe I believe this country is where you simply cannot practice as engineer without your formal degree. So by the way in this video, I Do not want to encourage people not to get a degree. That's just silly. If you can get a degree you can afford to, you've got the time, you've got the skills because there is quite a lot of advanced maths and everything else.

I Highly recommend. You do get it as a minimum foot in the door. And of course there's masters degrees and PhD but they're like just other levels again, which we're not really concerned about. We're Dave basically talking about.

working as a professional engineer. And the other thing is, can you call yourself an engineer without a degree? Yes, you can, because the term engineer is basically a vocational term. That means what you do for a living. If you don't do LS Tronics for a living, then you're just an electronics hobbyist.

Even if you have a degree, a degree does not make you an engineer. Qualifications do not make you something. You can go around saying I'm a qualified engineer. But if you don't work as an engineer, if you've never worked as an engineer, if you never had that vocation, you shouldn't be calling yourself an engineer.

And because it's a vocational thing, if you can get your foot in the door in an engineering company and get that job that title with engineering it. Whether you're an electronics engineer, you're an embedded engineer, you're a power engineer. You're a software engineer, computer engineer. whatever it is.

If you get that engineer title from your company from your peers, then you can certainly go around calling yourself a professional engineer. at least in most places. In certain states in the U.s. they'll find you.

or at least they used to. And the other thing is the type of the degree and the university that you went to here in Australia Nobody gives a toss in typical Aussie fashion. Yet again, nobody cares whether you went to the University of New South Wales or you went to you know, some tin-pot University in the Outback I Believe that's different in the US where it goes right up the top of your resume. I'm an MIT engineering graduate.

you know, right up the top in Big Ben or letters and you know there's a bit of snobbery involved. Let us know what it's like in your country here. No no one cares now. I Mentioned the Institute of Engineers Australia and how they're very formal with their different levels and stuff like that.

You can actually specially apply to be an engineer, a professional engineer, get proper membership status with the Institute of Engineers with no or lesser qualifications. but you actually have to sit, written or even spoke in interviews and tests and things like that. But you can actually do that if you're really wanting. Now the I Triple E which is the world's most famous electronics engineering institution, you don't actually need a degree to be a full member of the Institute of Engineers.

You can actually do it based on work experience as well. Now here's what everyone wants to know: How do you actually get your foot in the door? Well, that 4-year degree is certainly one way to do it. But if you just graduate with your bachelor's degree in engineering Whoop-dee-doo so did thousands of other people and you're all competing for the job, there's no way to stand out. if that's all you've got on your resume and as a employer myself and I've looked through thousands and thousands of resumes.

I'm just going nah nah nah oh. you got the University medal. Nah nah nah. It's because you haven't got anything else.

What do you do if you've got the university medal? Nobody cares, right? A lot of companies it might be coming in the US they care. Here in Australia nobody gives a toss. It's what have you done. So the thing you need to do and I've mentioned this in previous job interview videos is work on your own designs.

It's critically important that you have something to show on your resume and physically when you bring it when you get to the job In: If you don't tell you how to get the job interview in a minute, when you get to the job interview, you've got something to show off because I guarantee you 9 out of 10 people who show up for an evening you will be too lazy to do that. feel the one person that does that, you're gonna stand out and you're most likely to get the job. But there's one big hurdle if you don't have the minimum degree qualification that's often required for various odd jobs regardless of which country that you're in. And that's the human resources.

The HR droids with their magic algorithms that will match perfectly match the job requirements with your skills and qualifications. And if you don't tick, every box you get tossed in the bin. obviously what you need to do don't fight. The HR Droids go completely around them.

today. It is absolutely trivial to find contacts in companies. Let's say you we were talking about Texas Instruments today on the live stream, somebody really wanted to work there. Okay, fantastic.

What do you do? You go look at the Texas Instruments blogs articles for example, Fie who's writing all these blog articles or doing videos or other stuff. They'll typically have their name, their title. they'll often and from that it's often easy to find their email address, use your Google foo and often they'll have the email address in the article and that could person who's writing that only could be senior applications engineer or head applications engineer at Texas Instruments. For example, I told people to flood the head technical person at Ti.

but anyway, it's just an example. Any company you choose, get their contact details, email them directly, and this goes for anyone with or without a degree or a less of qualifications. no qualifications whatsoever. As long as you've got their body of work to show off, you can approach these people, go around the HR Droids and get your foot in the door.

So get those contact details of the technical person, direct, contact them and say hey, I read your blood ID or blah blah blah and I noticed that you were doing the boss you shouldn't be doing boys, you really I love your blog articles. you should be doing more of that. I can design those boards for you and I can help out if you've got any jobs going I can really do those for you or do a bang-up job and it'll be fantastic. Though you know you stand a good chance of getting a foot in the door if you go that direction you can use LinkedIn of course to find if you've just got a company.

Navy You can go there and find the head of engineering, the head of research. even just a lowly engineer working for a company. Contact them directly with your resume that shows off all your projects, tell them what you can do to help them out, and then they'll often, then pass it on by passing HR that if the engineers are too smart, they won't pass your resume to HR They'll pass it directly to their engineering manager or something like that. and that's how you get your foot in the door and you don't need qualifications to do it.

All you've got to do is show that you're enthusiastic and you can do something that they need. And the other thing we talked about in the livestream today is how you can get yourself some contract work. Either you know your might already have a full time job either in engineering or not and you want to get into it or you want to. you know you, starting your business.

you want to get into the field, but you don't have qualifications or even if you do have qualifications, one thing you should be do is your stuff. You should be designing and building your own stuff and then publish it. Because what happens when you publish stuff is that people find it and you might get linked on hackaday. You could get mention on the EEV blog for him.

You could get mentions anywhere. writers, people sharp in Google searches and when people find your webpage and look at your project, they're gonna go oh I need something like that because that's why they're there because they've already searched for that widget you worked on. all that aspect of whatever that thing that you've worked on does, they've landed on your page. They're looking for that kind of stuff and they see they don't care about your qualifications.

they say oh, this person has done this project. Isn't this really cool I need them to do something similar so they're gonna contact you and go, hey, you know I've got this requirement I Love your project. Can you do this for me and you go? Hey, sure bet I can And then that's your first contract engineering job and then that leads to another. One, Another one and it snowballs And before you know it, you're a professional engineer with no qualifications.

It's too easy these days with the internet or it's not easy. you've got to put in the hard work. You've got to have the talent you got to have the enthusiasm to produce the content to put out there, Naughton to publish and also put in your resume as well and physically take stuff along to the job interviews and all that sort of stuff. And don't forget the good old magazines they're still around.

Get your project published in a magazine that looks fantastic, especially to the HR droids - they might all published in X Sounds good tick. Nobody else has that tick. So yes, you can get a job in engineering with lesser or no qualifications whatsoever, and it doesn't even matter what country you're in. You can do contract work from anywhere in the world, and nobody's going to care as long as you can do the job for them.

So I hope that's encouraged a lot of people - I Get into engineering and when as I said I'm not saying avoid your degree I'm not saying it's useless or anything like that. That's a whole different topic that. well. we've discussed many times on the forum and other places, but yet if you can I highly recommend you get it.

But if you've only gotten a three-year degree or a two-year trade certificate or no patience, you can certainly still do it. And I hope that's encouraged you. given you a few ideas to work with and just remember if you've got lesser qualifications or even no qualifications and you're doing engineering work as your profession, start calling yourself an engineer because if you only do you you know two or three year certificate or diploma or associate's degree or whatever and you start calling yourself a technician. That's probably all you'll end up ever being.

If you're doing professional engineering work, call yourself a professional engineer and never let ever let a lack of qualifications stop you from applying for any job even if they say it a lot of the times in the job ads and it doesn't matter what country, there's a lot of the times they'll say yet, you need your Bachelor of engineering degree or you need your master's oil and it doesn't matter, Apply anyway. As always, you can discuss down below in the comments on the video or better yet to have a decent conversation over on the Eevblog forum link down below. There's a different thread for each video and there's certainly one for this. and there'll be local people in your country who you can ask advice from of how to get into engineering in your particular country because it does.

Things vary greatly around the world, but anyone anywhere can become an engineer I Hope you found it useful. Catch you next time.