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Hard Skills for Prospective Manufacturing Engineers

Published May 29, 2025

Table of Contents

Introduction

If you’re currently an engineering student you likely have asked what skills to pick up to help you land a job and be a better engineer. You’ve probably heard a lot of advice about soft skills like communication, teamwork, and presentation skills. If you’re like me, you are also tired of hearing these answers because you’ve already heard it before. Also, many of us become engineers because we are interested in technical subjects.

The reasons you hear these answers a lot are:

  • They apply to pretty much any job, unlike some technical skills.
  • They actually are some of the most important skills to learn.

Still, technical skills give you that extra edge over other applicants and can fuel your interest. If you are interested in becoming a manufacturing engineer, I’ll give you my perspective on what’s been useful in my first few years.

Disclaimer: Even within the Manufacturing Engineer title, job duties can differ a lot between companies. My experience is working in a semiconductor equipment company that does high value, low volume specialty equipment. I also work on a mechanical focused team.

General Handiness

Being able to get your hands dirty and get involved directly is a great skill to have as a manufacturing engineer. One of the main aspects of the job is resolving escalations to make sure the factory keeps running. You never know when you might get asked to remove a seized screw, troubleshoot on the floor, or perform an unorthodox repair. One of the biggest benefits is it can buy a lot of goodwill and belief from your technicians.

When I graduated, it was the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and companies were not hiring many entry level engineers. I took a job as an associate test engineer (basically a technician) for about a year and got to work on the processes I would later oversee as an engineer.

Consider working as a technician as a summer job or for an internship. Work on home improvement projects or take a woodworking class. Anything that helps you build confidence with tools, troubleshooting, and fixing broken things.

Excel

Excel makes the world run, and manufacturing is no exception. It is used for all kinds of applications, even when it is not the best tool for the job. As a manufacturing engineer you will likely use it for data analysis, data collection templates, and project management. You don’t need to be an Excel wizard, but get comfortable with basic hotkeys, tables, pivot tables, conditional formatting, charts, and formulas for math. The more you know, the more efficient you can be.

Bonus: Python

There’s a lot of programming languages out there but I would recommend starting with Python for manufacturing engineers. Its syntax is approachable and can be used for a lot of applications. On a team with engineers who only use Excel, Python can be a bit of a superpower. Letting you do complex data analysis quickly, creating custom data visualizations, and automating tasks that may be tedious.

Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T)

GD&T is quite important, but I would say it’s not universal to every company. Even companies who say they want to use GD&T may not use it effectively if it’s not enforced on the engineering teams. Still, I would recommend to read up on it and practice. College courses may teach lightly about the topic, but only cover things like the symbols.

The importance of GD&T is properly communicating design intent and function. If properly used, it allows technicians, engineers, and vendors to all understand a design through this common language.

Companies value it enough to send employees to trainings and certification tests. So it’s a real advantage if you can show proficiency in GD&T from the start.

Metrology

Metrology is a tool you will use to diagnose GD&T related issues. Metrology is the science of measurement and includes understanding how to use tools to verify dimensions against your drawings. Manufacturing engineers may regularly use calipers, dial gages, micrometers, go/no-go gauges, CMM (Coordinate Measuring Machine), and more.

It’s a really common part of my job, I recommend understanding what kind of tools are used to measure specific GD&T callouts like flatness and parallelism. If you have a student project, pick up some cheap tools off McMaster and check if your created part dimensions match the intended design.

CAD

CAD skill is not always important as a manufacturing engineer. For example on my team, there’s a spectrum. A few engineers likely don’t use any CAD, many engineers use it for visualization/troubleshooting, and a few use it for design.

The software you learn doesn’t really matter, you’ll end up using whatever your company has licenses for and the knowledge tends to be transferable.

I’m relatively CAD heavy for my team, but it’s still not something I use everyday. Understanding drawings is a must, but creating new drawings is not something everyone does.

Using it for troubleshooting is pretty common, which only requires knowing how to navigate, create sections, measure dimensions, and other read-only activities.

Creating or updating process plans may come up. Process plans are a kind of assembly/drawing that show each step involved in putting together an assembly.

I do get to create some new designs and update existing designs, but I’m in the minority for my team.

From my experience I would rank the importance:

  1. Understand and interpret drawings
  2. Read-only operations (sectioning, measurements, model representations)
  3. Creating drawings
  4. Create/update process plans
  5. Modeling

Closing Thoughts

You’ve probably heard of some or all of these skills, but hopefully you get an idea of which ones might be more important. These are fairly general skills, look at job postings at your desired companies to see what they value.

Manufacturing engineering can be quite demanding. You’ll be asked to complete a wide variety of projects and deal with problems vital to the company’s performance.

Just one soft skill

I want to say while this post has been about hard skills, one of the most useful things I got from college was: learning how to learn. The ability to go from being a total novice to becoming competent in a mostly self-guided manner is highly valuable in any workplace. Understand what works best for you. Be open to learning new topics and use failures as learning opportunities.