A good friend of mine had just got out of LSU when I met him. I was managing my first gas processing plant (I'd spent 10 years helping build and start them up) and he was our new engineer. This was almost 4 decades ago (that seems really odd to me). I told my boss that I didn't need an engineer, I needed mechanics! The boss said - He's the President of the company's best friends son :/ you're getting an engineer. We ended up hitting it off. He made it to Sr VP of Engineering of a large company that I worked at for 22 years. He recently retired. He is the best engineer I've ever known because he spent the time in the field that he needed to learn engineering. I have always worked closely with engineers. I wanted to know what they knew. I was set to go to Texas A&M when I graduated from high school but I couldn't. There were few, if any, "free rides" back then and my dad was battling Hodgkins disease Lymphoma). There was no way I was going to ask them for help. So I ended up working at "Dub Miller Ford"... I thought I was going to be a mechanic but instead I just cleaned up... so I hired on with a company that built the underground utilities in subdivisions (the Woodlands in north Houston). I drove a grease truck. It had a 500 gallon diesel tank on it that didn't have baffles, an air compressor, and various fluid and grease pumps on the back. The drive back to the shop always felt like I was in a cartoon choo choo train (in Houston traffic). The equipment drivers loved parking their equipment out in the middle of a mud flat because they knew I wouldn't be able to get the truck there. So I would mush my way out to the grader, BAK (big ass Komatsu) dozer, scraper, whatever. Fire it up and drive it to my truck for service. No training required (to drive it, cutting grade is a skill that I never acquired). Then put it back. If it's within my power... I don't let things get in the way of doing my job... Winter came, work slowed, and I moved back home to work for a local lease service (worked on oil and gas production sites). That was a nowhere job but it paid the bills. My dad's health was better and he was working again. He asked my how long I was going to stay at the lease service. Idk... Then he said, quit that job, you're coming to work for me. You'll be my helper. At that time he'd "gone back to his tools" and was an instrument fitter. Damned good one it turns out. That was the best thing I could have done. I got to know and understand him better. I only got 15 more years with him so that was irreplaceable time. Within I year I "busted out" as an instrument fitter. Engineers got to know me and vice versa. They kind of took me under their wing (mostly because I hounded them with questions), got me on the startup team, and that began my real education. There's a lot of math, chemistry, and physics used in the oil and gas business. Since then I've managed a small plant, a million square mile gas field with 6 plants and two fractionators, got transferred to the General Manager position in a large energy company (direct report to the VP of ops, who was an "8th grade educated, 2 tour Vietnam Marine vet (grunt as he called it), that had one of the sharpest minds of anyone I've ever known. He could read through a legal brief and when in a meeting he could pull "x vs y" precedents out of what seemed like thin air. Today he's almost 80 and isn't the same... bums me out to write that ), got divorced, kept the 4 kids so I took a large bump down so I could raise them, moved to TX and managed 4 pipeline systems, then down to Falfurrias to manage a plant, then did a little project management on a large plant build, and managed (also did the work) a small team that specialized in designing and installing process controls. The company changed to something I wasn't fond of so from there I partnered up with 2 friends and did control system design and programming. They are still friends but partnerships are messy sometimes so I'm glad that I'm out of that. Now I work for an independent oil and gas company. I manage the project group (all self starters that don't need managing), the SCADA group (same deal, self starters), the warehouse (self starter), and lab (amazing lady that gets more work done in 1/2 a day than some people do in a week), Soo, I'm kind of in a "rocking chair job" and not all that fond of it
So there you go, 1976 to 2021 in one really long paragraph...
The moral of the story is, you can get where you want to get to if you put the time, INTEREST, and effort into it. You don't "need" a college degree but it will carry you a little further up the ladder these days, if you have the right major. The problem that I've seen with that is sometimes they put the engineer into a managing role before he or she gets to fine tune their people skills. They'll need people skills... They also lose the opportunity to learn the nuances of the business. Every engineer I know, if he or she is honest, will tell you that they came out of college with a lot of useless knowledge. Their education begins in the field, where I have spent my life.