Managing Your Engineering Skills With MEM
Until a few years ago, engineering and management functions were considered to be different areas of study. Usually, students were advised to choose management courses such as Masters of Business Administration (MBA) to acquire the desired management and business skills. Today, with rapidly evolving economies – specialized courses like music technology, acoustics, motor sport engineering, leisure management and even engineering management have garnered steady momentum. While most of these courses are fairly new, young engineering graduates are favouring engineering management to better their careers!

What is MEM?
Masters of Engineering Management (MEM) is a specialized multidisciplinary course which entails studies for business methods and management expertise for engineering. Graduates from such disciplines find handsome employment opportunities with technology and engineering focused companies

Why MEM?
Studying MEM from a leading university is the ultimate challenge for engineering graduates with a passion for technology, innovation and business management.

How is it helpful? Students enrolled on the course grasp the fundamentals of business management, including finance, marketing and operations as well as information technology, focusing on decision engineering and supply chain management.

What are the requirements?
Today many reputed varsities around the globe offer degrees in engineering management at both graduate and postgraduate levels to offer a solid foundation in business principles and various modules in entrepreneurship, brand-building, management and even technology management.

Given the background, management courses for engineering are tailor made for engineers. It is critical to understand that unlike traditional courses for higher management (MBA), a post graduate in engineering management will require highly technical skills and quite a few also require a focus on computer/ information technology curriculum for risk and operations analysis. 

The programmes ensure that expert users of technology are produced with an aptitude for sound management and hands-on computer skills to solve business-specific problems. Accordingly the course content equips students with the requisite technical and leadership skill sets with higher level training on the training and managerial aspects of leading projects, systems and global teams in various organizations. Typical course content involves a lot of actual case studies and takes on various inter-disciplinary projects to enhance team-learning skills for students with subjects like accounting for engineers, computer simulation for risk and operations analysis et.al.

What is the admission criteria? While the normal admission criteria for MBA’s require GMAT scores, most MEM focused courses accept GRE too in addition to GMAT scores for selecting promising students.

Here’s a quick list of some of the most reputed institutions from the US, UK and Australia which offer MEM focused courses for post graduate students:

• MIT Systems Design and Management jointly offers a course with the MIT Sloan School of Management for Engineering Management
• University of Central Florida offers a MS in Engineering Management
•  Widener university offers Masters of Engineering in Engineering Management
•  Cornell university offers MEng for undergraduate students in fields like Mechanical, Civil, Electrical and Computer Science Engineering
• Stanford university offers an all round development plan for students with a Masters of Science and Engineering program in association with Silicon valley based companies

Students from this discipline are very much in demand and usually command good salaries across multiple sectors that involve technology as a key business growth enabler. Such sectors include energy management, oil and gas, telecommunications, scientific consulting firms, scientific research and development and most importantly technology companies thus offering variety of choices for future business analysts, project managers, engineering consultants. Oh, and Avanse offers highly customized Study loans for education to deserving students for these courses too!