Make factories, warehouses and hospitals run faster and waste less. The engineering degree most likely to end in a management job.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Licensed engineer
$88,000
Engineer-in-training
$65,000
Senior or operations manager
$125,000
Manufacturing and logistics jobs pay near the middle. Consulting pays more with longer hours. Many industrial engineers move into management, where pay goes well above this range.
$60,000 to $72,000
Engineer-in-training (EIT) or process improvement analyst
Auto plants and big logistics companies in Ontario pay at the upper end. Co-op students earn $20 to $26 an hour.
$100,000 to $150,000
Plant manager, operations director or management consultant
Industrial engineering is the engineering degree most likely to lead to a management title. That is where the money is.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is a four year engineering degree at the cheaper domestic rate with no professional licence, which is the reality for many industrial engineers whose work never involves sealing drawings. The high end is the same degree at the top of the range plus EIT (engineer in training) registration, several years of dues, the professional practice exam, and a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt course paid out of your own pocket. Employers commonly pay for the Green Belt once you are working. Engineering tuition runs above arts and business at almost every Canadian university, so the degree is the entire story here.
Many industrial engineers never get the P.Eng (professional engineer) licence because their jobs do not involve sealing drawings. It still helps, and it is cheap next to the degree.
Health, dental and a pension or matched savings plan
Bonuses
Tied to plant or company performance.
Profit sharing
At some manufacturers, including the big automakers.
Hybrid schedules
In office-based and consulting roles.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Degree, supervised experience, exam, licence. The licence matters less here than in other engineering fields.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Advanced Functions, Calculus, Physics and Chemistry are required for admission. Marks in the high 80s at most schools.
Accredited engineering degree
4 to 5 years with co-op
Industrial engineering at Toronto, Toronto Metropolitan, Dalhousie, Concordia, Windsor, Manitoba or Regina. Waterloo calls it management engineering. Some schools say manufacturing or systems engineering. All are accredited.
Engineer-in-training
About 4 years
Register as an engineer-in-training (EIT) with your provincial regulator. Work under a licensed engineer. Log your experience.
Professional practice exam
During your EIT years
A law and ethics exam, written during your first years of work.
P.Eng (professional engineer) licence
After 4 years
Optional in many industrial jobs, but it protects your title and opens doors in consulting and government.
Calculus and Advanced Functions
Required.
Physics
Required.
Chemistry
Required at most schools.
Data management or statistics
Industrial engineering runs on statistics.
Business
You will be reading budgets by your second year of work.
Industrial engineering is a recognised engineering discipline, and graduates register as engineers-in-training with the provincial regulator, such as APEGA (Alberta's regulator) or Engineers and Geoscientists BC (EGBC). Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) closed its engineer-in-training program to new applicants in 2023: there you work, log your 4 years of experience and then apply. But much of the work is process design, scheduling and analysis rather than stamped drawings, so plenty of people work for years without a licence. You still cannot call yourself an engineer without one.
Ontario
Toronto, Toronto Metropolitan, Waterloo (management engineering), Windsor, Ontario Tech (manufacturing engineering).
Quebec
Concordia, Polytechnique Montréal.
Prairies
Manitoba, Regina (industrial systems engineering).
Atlantic
Dalhousie (Halifax).
Things you don't need, but that help.
Lean Six Sigma belts
Green Belt, then Black Belt. The standard credential for process improvement. Employers often pay.
PMP (Project Management Professional)
Moves you into managing projects and budgets.
SCMP (Supply Chain Management Professional)
The Canadian supply chain designation. Logistics jobs like it.
MBA (master of business administration)
The classic jump into senior management.
Co-op at a factory or distribution centre
See a real production line before you graduate.
Excel, Python and simulation software
Most of the analysis lives in a spreadsheet or a model.
A part-time job in a busy kitchen, warehouse or store
You will start seeing broken processes everywhere. That instinct is the job.
Hospitals use industrial engineers to cut emergency department wait times, schedule operating rooms and design how patients move through a building. It is the same math as a factory, applied to people. If you want engineering that is not about machines, this is one of the few doors in.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
On a plant floor by 7 with a stopwatch and a tablet, timing a production line and asking operators where the bottlenecks are. Mid-morning, into a spreadsheet or simulation model to test a new layout. Lunch with the maintenance team. Afternoon meetings on next quarter's production schedule and a cost-saving proposal for the plant manager. In logistics, swap the plant floor for a warehouse. In healthcare, for a hospital ward.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Industrial engineering began in the early 1900s with people timing factory workers. Two of them, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, had 12 kids and ran their home like a factory. The book about it, Cheaper by the Dozen, became a movie.
The Toyota Production System, built in Japan after the Second World War, is the model for lean manufacturing everywhere. Toyota's plants in Cambridge and Woodstock, Ontario run on it and hire industrial engineers.
Ontario is one of the biggest car-building regions in North America, with assembly plants running in Oakville, Oshawa, Windsor, Alliston, Cambridge and Woodstock. Every one of them has industrial engineers on the floor. Two more, in Brampton and Ingersoll, have been idled or closed since 2023, a reminder that plants come and go with the automakers' decisions.
Amazon, Air Canada, Loblaw and big hospitals all hire industrial engineers. If an organization moves things or people and wants to do it faster, there is an industrial engineer somewhere in the building.
Last checked September 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in Canadian dollars, based on Government of Canada Job Bank wage data and published salary grids. They vary by province, employer and experience. Tuition is for domestic students.