Why So Many CEOs Are Engineers?

There is one feature of Sundar Pichai - the head of Alphabet Inc., Satya Nadella - the head of Microsoft, Elon Musk - the head of Tesla, Tim Cook - the head of Apple Inc., Jeff Bezos - the founder and the former CEO of Amazon.com and many other Fortune 500 CEOs that cannot be overlooked. In this article, we are going to attempt to explain why so many CEOs and other high-level managers that engineers have engineering degrees.

Many of the present CEOs have engineering backgrounds, which shows that technical skills and problem-solving skills are important in running large companies. Sundar Pichai received his Bachelor of Technology in Metallurgical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology and then went to Stanford University to obtain an M.S. in Material Sciences and Engineering. Satya Nadella has a degree in engineering, specifically in Electrical Engineering. He studied in the U.S. and obtained a Master of Science in Computer Science degree.

Tim Cook’s educational experience includes an industrial engineering Bachelor of Science degree. Jeff Bezos attended college at Princeton where he received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His engineering education was very instrumental in the formation and growth of Amazon. The current CEO of AMD, Lisa Su, is one of the few female CEOs and her educational background is in electrical engineering. She got her Bachelor, Master, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In other words, engineering has become the most common undergraduate degree leading to an executive office and a 7-figure salary. When I was studying at university Mechanical Engineering, I could not understand why we needed subjects like Philosophy, Intellectual Property, studying economics for a year, and so many subjects that did not seem related to engineering at first sight.

Engineering is the process of solving technical problems, and they are going to teach you that; they are going to teach you to think bigger. Philosophy is great at getting you to think about the big questions – the right and wrong, why we do what we do. Understanding IP means you know how to protect your ideas so that others cannot steal them. Economics and business courses will help you to learn how to create positive cash flow and make your company profitable and sustainable.

So, when you are in your studies, and you are wondering why you have to know about all these other subjects, believe me, it is for something. These lessons are stepping stones to becoming not just a great engineer but a great leader too.

Some of the skills you learn in an engineering degree will be useful in management positions. McGinn is the senior editor at Harvard Business Review and said that when HBR first asked about the educational background, it spoke with management experts who pointed out that engineering is a problem-solving discipline that engineers learn to think analytically and use structure when coming up with solutions.

So then, in my career development, I fully appreciated the value of more than 50 subjects I learned at the university. When I started at Shell, I moved up through 4 Job Groups in just 6 years. I went from being a technician to supervising more than 50 people as the Head of Mechanical Maintenance, and I did all this before I turned 30, making me the youngest Discipline Head in that field.

Engineering education focuses on critical thinking and problem-solving approaches to address various challenges. Engineers are taught to divide the task into its component activities, to think about each of the components, and to understand how they are all connected. This analytical thinking is critical for CEOs, who have to determine the possible consequences of their actions for various areas of the business.

In the modern world, it is a benefit to have a CEO with a strong understanding of technical processes. This is especially important in industries where the main products or services are technical. The CEOs with engineering backgrounds can give their companies a strategic advantage in product development, innovation, and technology strategy.

Engineering is the process of identifying and handling risks; from ensuring that structures are safe to preventing failure in the design of a product. This experience in risk analysis and control is helpful in the corporate world where the CEOs make evaluations of the risks and returns of the plans and decisions that are to be undertaken. Engineers are typically strong in risk analysis, identifying the possible threats, and developing plans to address them.