Career decision question - Help Please!!!
I'm currently an engineer in the aerospace division of a F50 company. I've been in our engineering rotation program for about 2 years now and almost at the tail end of my rotation which means I'll have to pick a permanent group for the next few years. Throughout my rotations I've realized 2 things - i) real world engineering isn't as hands on as I thought it would be, ii) it isn't what I really want to do long term and I'm more interested in the business / management (Strategy, FP&A, Corp Dev) side of things.
Over the past months I was thinking maybe just get through the next 2-3 years in engineering and try to get into a top 50 MBA (top 20 ultimate goal) from there. But recently I've seen this operations role in our building systems division that I applied to and after interviewing with the managers there they really like the technical & elementary programming skills I bring to the table.
After talking to the managers this is how I interpreted the focus of this role: in this role I'll be working with engineering, finance, sales and supply chain on monthly basis and these will be my primary responsibilities: division's inventory planning & management * improving JDE platform * implementing Engineering changes * Kanban Management * performing logistics cost analysis and perform * sales and operation planning analysis. Essentially this role will be very data driven role and I sort of interpreted it as business analytics role.
Now coming from an engineering background I really don't much about finance roles and this is where I can really use some guidance from the wise folks of this forum. So these are the concerns that I have about this career transition: i) is this is good idea? - how are operations roles viewed in finance. Ii) if I take this operations role will I be hurting my chance of getting into a top MBA program if I decide to do a FT mba in 3-4 yrs, iii) if I decide against a FT program and want to make a switch to FP&A / corporate strategy using this operations experience and a PT MBA, will it be difficult to do so?
