Product Design Engineering with a Year in Industry
Product design engineering combines the inventive, human-centred thinking of design with the technical knowledge of engineering, producing practitioners who can take an idea from initial concept through to a manufacturable product. It is a discipline concerned with how things work, how they are made, and how people interact with them, which means graduates develop skills that are relevant across almost every sector that makes physical or digital products. The ability to move fluently between design thinking and engineering analysis is increasingly valuable in industries where innovation cycles are fast and the expectations of users are high.
At the University of Liverpool, this programme includes a year in industry as part of its four-year full-time structure. That embedded professional experience is a defining feature of the degree, giving you the opportunity to work in a real product development environment, build a professional network, and understand how the skills developed in university translate to a commercial setting. The year in industry also tends to strengthen your final-year work, as you return to academic study with a much sharper sense of how design and engineering decisions play out in practice.
Across the programme you will study the core engineering disciplines relevant to product development, including materials science, manufacturing processes, mechanics, and electronics, alongside design methodology, prototyping, user research, and visualisation. You will develop competence in computer-aided design tools and will work through projects that require you to integrate technical and creative thinking to solve genuine problems.
Product design engineering graduates typically move into roles in product development, industrial design, manufacturing engineering, and innovation consultancy. The combination of skills the degree develops is also relevant to roles in human factors and ergonomics, packaging, medical device development, and sustainability-focused design. Further study at postgraduate level is an option for those who want to specialise more deeply in a particular aspect of the field.