Thanks for the suggestion! That would be something in the context of either education or administration, right? Ironically, I always had the idea that people end up in the university system if they're »not good enough to work in the real world«.

You'll probably want to look for research engineering related positions, a lot of universities have associated research laboratories that do R&D work for various organizations. Regarding the quality of people, I have one friend who just went from a university position to Google and another that went to Apple.