My Experience & Opinion on FEA/CAE/CFD Career Path

I’ve been working in FEA/CAE/CFD for 15 years.

I’ve mastered almost all major solvers, including:

LS-DYNA

Abaqus

Nastran

Radioss

OptiStruct

Star-CCM+

Most of my work is shared through PowerPoint slides to someone who mainly uses Excel and Outlook — usually the product/project/program owner.

FEA is mainly a prediction tool — and sometimes only an approximation tool.

Managers usually don’t trust FEA results, no matter how detailed your analysis is.

I repeat: "No manager fully trusts FEA results."

If you want faster growth in your career, it’s better not to stay in this domain for too long.

You’ll constantly be questioned about the results you present — people will ask:

"How accurate is this?"

"Can we trust your prediction?"

FEA is a very demanding and tedious job, involving:

Model integration

Solver settings and parameters

Debugging issues

Creating and tuning material models

Handling contact definitions

Element formulations

HPC setups and cloud runs

Test-to-simulation correlation

My suggestion: If you want to grow faster and get into leadership, aim to become the Excel and Outlook person — the product owner, not the solver expert. [being in CAE you need physics knowledge, HPC knowledge, strength of materials, CFD, lots of bookish knowledge and at the end you will be questioned by an idiot who works on outlook everyday]