Systems engineer vs substation engineer as first job

[u/Toppers87]

Hi all, am looking at these two right out of college and wondered if the sub has any experience as far as career trajectories go? Both pay the same and have similar commute times, but substation role provides overtime pay. If it matters, thinking of grad school way down the line with a masters in either sustainable energy or electrical engineering.

I loved my controls and signals classes at uni, but have heard mixed things on systems engineering. It's at Rovisys and has on-site work configuring stuff like PLC control setups and site acceptance testing which seems like a great jumpstart to a career.

Substation role is at Enercon Services. I enjoyed my power courses and my interest has always been improving the energy infrastructure via grid work. This path seems more in line with a traditional PE track and is more office based with a consistent schedule.

[u/Plussquared]

Im an Electrical Engineer and i design switchgears, transformers, generators, ring main units which are part of a substation. If the setting is on the wider industrial industry, there are lots of demands for such. im not sure about the utility industry because the changes may not be as frequent compared to other industries. but considering the growth of data centres, wind farms, batteries, solar, there are probably high demands now. on systems engineering, im also a instrumentation and control engineer and my job normally designing connections of systems to PLCs, SCADA. then we Subcontract the systems integration of my designs. the systems engineering is not that work intensive compared to electrical engineering works as per my experience.