Electrical engineers are typically highly-skilled people who are very much in-demand in any job market. Maybe, however, the idea of working for a corporate isn’t for you. Maybe you’d prefer to be your own boss. That’s entirely feasible, but it’s important to remember that it will require business skills to go along with your technical skills. Here are four tips from Components Bureau to get you started.
Be sure that you do actually want to be your own boss doing this electrical work. Being your own boss is a whole lot of work. If it is what you really want, then the work is absolutely worth it, however, if it is not you may quickly find yourself wishing that you’d taken that safe, corporate job after all. If by “be your own boss” what you really mean is “work independently and flexibly” then you might be better to look for a company which has that culture, or work as a contractor (or both).
Choose A Niche
Electronic engineers can work across a huge number of industries, which can make it hard to decide exactly what kind of business you want to start. In general, when starting your own business, the best niche is the one in which passion meets practicality. In the case of electrical engineering, practicality will also include issues such as cost and legality.
Admittedly, this is also true of other industries, but it has particular relevance for electronic engineering. For example, your passion may be to create educational toys for children, but anything which is sold for use by children is very heavily regulated, so you would either need to familiarize yourself with these regulation or find someone to guide you or find a legal and ethical way to work around them, for example, by creating designs for children’s toys for other people to create themselves.
Do Your Sums Thoroughly Before You Start Parting With Your Cash
The more money you need to get your business off the ground, the more certain you need to be that it will be sustainable over the long term. For example, it typically costs a lot more to start a business producing high brightness LEDs than it does to start a business producing Cathode Ray Tubes, but the LED light industry currently looks to be massively more sustainable in every sense of the phrase. By opting for a provider like Infinite Energy that offers renewable energy plans, you will start to see the benefit in no time.
Having said that, it pays for engineers and engineering companies to look at all your options. For example, although it requires significant investment to set up a business which produces LED lights from scratch, it is relatively affordable to start a business which assembles them.
Remember, Where There’s Muck, There’s Money
The growing awareness of the need for sustainability offers huge opportunities for electrical engineers. In particular, the issue of electronic waste is a massive problem and any engineers who can come up with a cost-effective solution to it, even on a small scale, can potentially do very well out of it as well as helping the environment.
For example, refurbishing electronics to give them a new lease of life (and keep them out of landfill) can be lucrative fun and satisfying. This can also help you run a green and lean startup.
