How To Get Into Engineering: Routes, Qualifications & Options

Somewhere along the way, many people picked up the idea that there's only one way to get into engineering: get top marks, go to university, spend years on a maths-heavy degree, done. It's a nice story, but not entirely true. Unfortunately, it quietly puts off a lot of brilliant future engineers before they've even started.

If you've assumed you've already missed your chance, or that you don't tick the right boxes, we’re here to tell you that - you haven't, and you probably do. There are more ways into engineering than most people realise, whether you're just starting to explore the idea or you're already a few years into studying or working in the field. Women still make up under a third of engineering graduates worldwide, which is exactly why guides like this one exist: to make the routes into the industry easier to see. This is a walk-through of some of your options.

How to Get Into Engineering: More Routes Than You'd Think

There isn't a single formula, so whatever your school, careers advisor, or well-meaning relative might have implied, they’re not always correct. Around the world, people take many different paths into the field, and none of them is the ‘proper’ one. They just suit different people, budgets, and stages of life.

University: The Traditional Route

A university degree is a multi-year course ending with a qualification in your chosen area.

Do you need a degree to be an engineer? Not always. However, for certain specialisms, particularly ones with safety or regulatory responsibilities attached, it's still the most direct route. A degree gives you time to build deep, structured understanding before you're expected to apply it. If you like the idea of a few years to properly explore a subject, test out different areas of engineering, and figure out your specialism before jumping into work, this route tends to suit that pace of learning well.

It's not the only academic option either. Some people study something adjacent first (maths, physics, computing) and move into engineering later through further study or a conversion course.

Apprenticeships: Learn While You Earn

An apprenticeship is a structured training programme where you work for an employer while you learn, often alongside some classroom-based study, and you're paid a wage the whole way through. 

Engineering apprenticeships vs university often get framed as a straight competition, but they're just different journeys to the same destination. Apprenticeships let you train on the job, and you get paid while you learn. Also, you are able to build genuine workplace experience early, without years of study before you touch real projects. For a lot of people, learning by doing simply sticks better than learning from a textbook first and applying it later.

Internships: Hands-On Before You Commit

An internship is a fixed-term placement with a company, usually lasting anywhere from a few weeks to a year, that gives you hands-on exposure to real engineering work without committing to a full job. 

Internships don't always get treated as a proper route in their own right, but more like something you add on top of a degree. In practice, a well-chosen internship can be exactly how to get into engineering for people who learn best by watching real projects up close before committing to a longer course of study. Some internships run alongside university; others exist as standalone entry points, especially in engineering fields where employers value hands-on exposure as much as formal training.

Vocational Training: Fast, Practical, Focused

Vocational courses are shorter and hands-on, teaching you the exact skills you need for a particular role.

Technical and vocational engineering courses sit somewhere between a university degree and a full-time job. These are shorter and more hands-on than a degree, but more structured than jumping straight into a job. For anyone still figuring out how to get into engineering without committing to years of study upfront, this route is worth a proper look. These courses suit people who already know roughly which area of engineering interests them and want practical, applied skills fast, rather than a broad academic foundation.

Further Study & Career Change: It's Never Too Late

Further study and career-change routes cover things like postgraduate conversion courses, professional retraining, or self-directed learning - the ways people move into engineering after they've already started down a different path. 

This is the route people talk about least, and it matters more often than we know. Plenty of engineers didn't start out planning to become one. They studied something else, worked in a different field, then moved across through a postgraduate conversion course, a portfolio of self-directed projects, or simply retraining while working. In some technology-related engineering roles especially, self-taught skills and real projects can carry real weight alongside formal qualifications.

Photo by ThisisEngineering on Unsplash

The Skills Worth Building

Whichever version of how to get into engineering you're eyeing up, a few things tend to help across the board, regardless of country or system.

Comfort with maths and science subjects gives you a head start, but it's rarely the deciding factor people assume it is. Confidence is something you build, not something you're born with. Curiosity matters more than people expect: the habit of asking why something works the way it does, and poking at it until you understand it properly. Problem-solving matters too, along with a genuine tolerance for getting things wrong before getting them right, since that's most of what engineering actually involves day to day.

Teamwork counts for more than people think as well. Very little engineering happens alone. Most of it is collaborative, back-and-forth, built on explaining your thinking to other people and taking their feedback seriously. That's basically the whole story of how to become an engineer: figuring out which door fits you, then learning to work well through it.

There's No Single ‘Right’ Way In

Here's the part worth sitting with: however you work out how to get into engineering, your route doesn't need to look like anyone else's. Someone with a steady academic pathway, top marks, and a clear run through university isn't more of a ‘real’ engineer than someone who came in sideways through an apprenticeship, a career change, or years of self-taught projects. They've just taken different roads to the same place.

The question of how to become an engineer as a girl doesn't have one universal answer either. Your background, your environment, your confidence with certain subjects, where you live, what opportunities are actually available to you - all of that shapes which route makes sense. None of it disqualifies you. If you're 15 and still working out whether engineering is even for you, that's exactly the right stage to be exploring, not deciding. And if you're 22 and already a few years into a completely different path, wondering if it's too late to pivot, it isn't. Plenty of engineers you'll meet took this route.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

In the end, it's less about finding the one correct path, and more about being honest with yourself about how you learn best, what you can realistically commit to right now, and which door is actually open to you at this exact moment. There's rarely a wrong answer here; just the one that fits your life as it actually is.

Ready to keep exploring? With ENGRL, you can explore the different routes in engineering, the full range of engineering disciplines, and answers to common questions in our FAQs. If you want to see what some of these routes look like in practice, our opportunities board is full of apprenticeships, courses, internships, and more - for girls figuring out how to get into engineering right now. Have a look, save what catches your eye, and take it one step at a time.