Engineer Survey: Engineering Vs Engineering Technology

[appolo78]

The difference between Engineering and Technology is not that one is more hands-on or practical than the other. Rather, the fundamental difference between the two is that Engineering is more about developing/design systems while Technology is more about supporting those systems.

As such, Engineering and Technology are complementary fields. Engineers need to start from a theoretical framework in order to develop/design systems while technicians need to understand how those systems work in order to support them.

That fundamental difference between Engineering and technology not only explains how or why engineers tend to rise to management but also gives engineers a career advancement advantage because engineers by designed manage the implementation of their systems, which are to be supported by technicians.

[JesseK]

I graduated in '05 with a Electrical Engineering degree from Georgia Tech (go Yellow Jackets!). We had a very mean joke about the difference between Engineering and Engineering Technology degrees (a scantron) but that's simply because the Engineering Technology students we saw at the university next door got to goof off while we pulled all-nighters on some project or another. My real point here is that while there is a difference in the degrees, there are also differences in the universities that teach the degrees.

There are some hands-on skills that EET's have that I had to learn on-the-fly, like proper soldering, large circuit digram analysis, environmental factors, etc. Yet these days there's a plethora of resources for that type of stuff if one's up for it --like YouTube and cheap books from Amazon.