[onewhippedpuppy]

Originally Posted by einreb

The 'professional services engineering' business is a tough one to be an 'entrepreneur' as a very young engineer. It just not particularly conducive to that sort of move early on in a career.

On the mechanical 'consulting engineer' side, a young PE and and older non-licensed but connected engineer is often the seed 'team' to start up a business... but I don't know how/if that applies to the aerospace industry.

All true. I would be further handicapped because the bulk of my experience lies in managing projects. I don't have any specialized skills (stress analysis, CATIA design, etc) that would be appealing to a company. Worse yet, there's a move away from contracting out engineering, at least in our local companies. Much cheaper to hire an engineer than hire a contractor at 3x the wage. The bulk of our outside suppliers are for component level parts and assemblies.

Any potential self-employment opportunities would probably lie outside the field of engineering, unless I have some epiphany that will make me millions.