For technicians, industrial engineering offers career prospects in a broad range of settings where industrial controls and equipment must be installed, maintained, tested and repaired. Students at Flint Hill Technical College in Emporia, Kansas, can earn a one-year certificate or two-year associate degree in industrial engineering technology and gain specialized certifications in HVAC, boiler operation or industrial programmable logic controllers. The certificate program is designed to ready its graduates for immediate employment or to continue on for an associate degree.
The South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City offers a baccalaureate in industrial engineering that grounds its students in the discipline's fundamentals while helping them understand its integration into management tasks and systems. Through a variety of laboratory and service-learning opportunities, students gain functional experience that prepares them for professional responsibilities. Graduates qualify for entry-level engineering positions. Students can distinguish themselves further as workforce candidates by gaining management, project quality and innovative development program certifications, including Six Sigma Greenbelt, Technology Innovation and Engineering Management and Leadership.
Purdue University's School of Industrial Engineering offers a bachelor's degree program on its West Lafayette, Indiana campus. This degree serves as the gateway to a career in many roles and industries, from health care to manufacturing and transportation to insurance. Students can focus or broaden their studies with a minor in one of more than 40 engineering fields and prepare for the working world through research experience, internships and on-site learning laboratories. Purdue also offers master's and doctoral degrees in industrial engineering, with master's programs for students with engineering baccalaureates and those from other disciplines. Master's candidates can complete original research for a thesis or additional coursework for a non-thesis degree. Doctoral study can focus on one of five multi-disciplinary research areas designed to prepare the student for a career in research, teaching or both.
Along with a full roster of baccalaureate programs, Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, also offers graduate degrees in industrial engineering through the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering of the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science. Professionals in the workforce can earn post-baccalaureate certification in quality engineering through three years of online study while on the job. With master's degrees in industrial and systems engineering, management science and engineering, analytical finance and health care systems engineering, Lehigh serves students whose academic and professional interests include manufacturing systems and processes, operations research and information systems. Some master's degrees can be completed in one year on campus or with two years' online study. The school's doctoral program covers applied studies in financial engineering, information systems or manufacturing through the study of optimization (algorithms, programming and analysis) or applied probability and statistics (measuring and forecasting systems and their data).