Computer Engineer?

                       

Among the various types of engineering fields, Computer Engineering is also another creative and highly intuitive Engineering Field. But for a long time, it was not mentioned as a separate type in many professional bodies. Institute of Engineering Sri Lanka accepted and categorized computer engineering into Information technology and Computer Engineering Category since 2010.

Then to be a Computer Engineer, what are the qualifications that should be fulfilled by someone. Most of people may answer this question as “follow a degree in computer science and engineering”. Then the hidden meaning of that answer is that doing another type of IT degree is not a qualification to be a computer engineer. Actually according to the convention, Computer Science and Engineering graduates are only considered as Computer Engineers. People who follow some IT degrees go to the category of IT professionals and People with Computer Science degrees, go to the category of Computer Scientists. But the problem is most of the Computer Science students do not have an ambition to be a Computer Scientist and end up as a Software Engineer.

My PoC is that none of these degrees are not the one and only way to be a Computer Engineer. Here I should mention that Software Engineer and Computer Engineer are two different characters, though both of them make software. Computer Engineer is a person who applied the theories of computing and latest hardware and networking technologies efficiently to overcome real world problems. Software Engineer engages in the software part of this big role. So being a computer engineer depends only on just someone’s knowledge and attitudes. People with very high education qualifications may not have the viewpoint to be a computer engineer. They just think from one side towards problem or always try to give typical solutions to the problems. There may be rarely some other people with law qualifications but who think as real engineers towards the problems.

So, if you want to be a Computer Engineer what you should do? You should improve your skills and attitude. Degree is enough to acquire some professional recognition. Knowledge of a computer engineer should spread through all the areas related to computing. He should know the h/w architecture and how they operate. If not he cannot use available resources efficiently. In software phase, he should know about s/w technologies and architectures that he is working in, in order to develop a better solution. At present, most of the systems run on the network. Solutions run on a local machine are not enough anymore. So the knowledge about basics of networking is also very important to a computer engineer. In addition to these, creativity, hard working and innovation makes him better.

These are the things that make a computer engineer, according to my point of view. Wish you all the best!