Decisions as an engineering graduate...the trade off between passion and money? 5

[jd90]

Hello everyone, I'm posting this topic because I believe this is a debate that affects a lot of young engineers making key decisions at the moment, including myself.

There's a diverse mix of engineering students university, everything from hating engineering and wanting to get out as fast as possible, to those who love it and stay on to pursue academia, but what if you are stuck in the middle? I guess it would seem obvious to assume the latter would be the majority, but I'm not quite sure that's the case.

Personally I love the subject (I study Mechanical Engineering in the UK currently taking my masters), and I go through phases of enjoying different topics but at the end of the day I get a buzz from finding a solution and getting things to work how I intend them to. So when it comes to looking for graduate work, I find jobs aligned with my interests such as types of analysis, simulation software and design etc. to be yielding average salaries (around £27,000) but the general consensus of articles I find online is that this salary is unlikely to increase much over the course of your career. However does this mean if you were to stay in this entry level role specifically?

For example go to google and type in 'Design Engineer Salary' and immediately you are confronted with a bold '£28,489 per year' from PayScale. Now as a graduate entering at around this salary I would hope over time this would increase a fair bit. As salary seems to be directly correlated with responsibility, does this mean that your only route for progressing is to step out of this technical role? Is it 'unwise' to be following this technical career path if you want to progress to >£50,000?

I'm trying to stay realistic here in terms of balancing my passion for engineering and salary, the salary is important in terms of long term stability and family etc. yet so is the enjoyment of the job, so I'm really putting a lot of thought into this. As a lot of engineering students I have the urge to branch out into technical areas outside engineering but this is mostly influenced by the inviting prospect of high salaries and rapid progression (goodbye engineering?). Or is it worth pursuing a Chartered status with the expectation that this will open doors to higher salaries?


If anyone has any thoughts on this please let me know, any advice for me and thousands of other students out there is most welcome.

Thanks for reading this long post!

 

[KENAT]

Don't get hung up on most online Salary surveys etc.

I started at £17,000 in 1999 and by the time I left the UK in 2003 was at £27,270 - not saying this is necessarily typical or what you should expect adjusted for inflation... but giving you one real world example.

In the UK I'd say going Chartered probably makes sense regardless of specific sub field you're in - don't count on it massively increasing your salary but it should open a few more doors to give you more options.

If engineering technical path is what interests you, and you can get by on the pay at an acceptable standard of living then sounds like the way to go.

If money is the be all & end all then engineering field even as a stepping stone to management may not be the path I'd suggest.

IMHO Chasing a dream that doesn't stand a chance of supporting you financially is irresponsible. However, chasing $$$ doing something you hate is just as bad an idea.

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[zdas04]

There seem to be a huge number of "engineers" responding to those surveys who are actually working in fast food. My whole career I never made less than twice the average income for my industry for my discipline. When I got in a supervisor role and had to see other people's salaries, no one working for me was ever less than twice the average. Consequently I have to think that the groupings are not quite a clean as the survey companies would have us believe.

It is pretty common for an average engineer to double their salary in 20 years (about 4% annual increase) and double their income (including bonuses) in 10. It is not uncommon for a star to double their salary in 5 years (19% annual). A lot of intern programs have built in increases at major milestones (e.g., +10% at end of each intern rotation, which makes a 4% annual increase double your salary in 14 years).

Some people see engineering as a path to management, and it has been for many engineers. In my career I dipped my toe into supervision several times, and then dashed back to working for a living. Had a great career, made a lot of money, did a lot of work I was proud of. All large companies claim to have a technical track and a management track for engineers, but the big money will always be on the management track. If that is where your interests lie, an MBA can make a lot of sense to let you skip the messy slogging through the project world, but some of us liked the project world.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[Maui]

And some of us dislike MBAs ("Massive Brain Aneurysm").

Maui

 

[cranky108]

If your in it for money, you picked the wrong profession.

If you like what you do, you will do better than Joe Blow, but not as good as super star seller, or over paid management.

 

[SNORGY]

A star for Maui's Blunt Acronym.

 

[SNORGY]

But seriously, jd90,

Pursue engineering if you like engineering for the sake of engineering.

It's like zdas04 states, if you take care of that, the money will take care of itself, and the perceived boundary conditions around salary will be soft.

 

[GregLocock]

Another UK datapoint. My first job after graduating in 1983 I was on 4000 pounds, I left the UK in 1990 and I was on 19000 (after moving twice). At the time the annual increment for recent grads with stuck with the program was huge. My impression is that starting salaries have increased, relative to median wage, but the annual bump has lessened.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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[Compositepro]

Picking a career based on salary surveys is like picking a stock to invest in based on past performance. It rarely works well in the long term. There are never any guarantees in life. The only thing that usually works is to pursue your passion and have talent or aptitude in that area. Students who choose engineering because of pay usually make really poor engineers.

Highly talented and educated people can take advantage of many opportunities they never imagined they would encounter. Others simply never encounter those opportunities. In my experience, most engineers severely limit their their achievements by not being flexible to relocation and not taking any risks (wanting a guaranteed outcome before accepting an opportunity). Engineers are generally very risk averse.

If you get married, have children, get a house mortgage, and don't save enough to live without a paycheck for a year or two, you will have greatly limited your opportunities. Engineers who put in their eight hours doing basic job functions are a dime a dozen, and not that much different than workers at McDonald's, except that they will get paid a little more.

 

[IRstuff]

So, you'd rather make the big bucks and hate every hour you spend at work? Sounds like prostitution?

Just bear in mind that you're more likely to get better raises at something that you can feel passion about and excel at it, than at something you have little interest in. Unless you are as good as faking it as the very best porn stars, it will be obvious to most people that you are disinterested in the subject, and are merely there for the money. This perception will color your raises and advancement.

TTFN
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[SomptingGuy]

If you really want big money in engineering in the UK, go looking for a job in one of those companies that spring up to syphon government funding. There's always a new one that has a world-beating invention to develop and prove out. They attract clever people and pay them well. It's not that different from what universities do and call research, just that the employees earn cash instead of titles.

Steve

 

[ScottyUK]

"Engineers are generally very risk averse."

In my current line of work that is an attribute, not a flaw. No one likes burning oil terminals.

 

[miningman]

MBA.. mediocre but arrogant. You'd better think twice about doing an MBA unless you REALLY know why your doing it. Maui and I are probably in vastly different fields but have very similar opinions on this matter.

 

[someguy79]

Stick with something you don't mind doing, or if you can, something you like to do. An awful lot of your life will be spent at work, don't make it torturous. You'll be unhappy that way.

Zdas04, do you mean that the salary tends to double every 20 years, not inflation adjusted? If yes, then I would agree. If you do account for inflation, the increase is not as impressive. Then again, I could've gotten that wrong and I'm working in the wrong place!

 

[GregLocock]

That'd put an about to retire /engineer/ at about 4 times a graduate, which seems a little on the high side from my experience in a large manufacturing company, but then zdas did something more sensible than that. If you are prepared to go into management then even as a fairly low level manager then that sort of multiplier per decade is easily obtainable.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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[zdas04]

Those numbers are current dollars. An average of 4% annual increase in a 6% inflation would be loosing ground every year (often made up by bonuses). Except for total disruptions starting offers tend to go up at about half inflation.

Total disruptions are a different beast. For example, in Oil & Gas very very few people were hired between 1986 and 2002. If the average starting salary in 1986 was $30k USD, then the normal run of things would have a 2002 grad starting at about $42k, but the industry had killed too many Pet Eng programs at universities and had to pay closer to $70k to compete for new hires. That went up sharply until last year's oil price collapse. I retired in 2003, and many of the gray-hairs that were my peers saw huge pay increases in 2005-2010 to try to maintain the gap.

The magnitude of the numbers changes from industry to industry and location to location, but the overall experience is pretty normal--absent a huge disruption, working engineers should double their raw salary between 6 (super stars) and 20 (average) years, while new hire offers should double in something like 30 years.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[moltenmetal]

Analysis of the salary survey data for Ontario, Canada shows close to the same pattern today as there was twenty five years ago: the mean salary path starts at x, and is 2x in dollars of constant purchasing power (i.e. adjusting for inflation) after about ten years of experience, where salaries start to increase only at the rate of inflation thereafter unless matched by a jump into a specialization or management. The path between x and 2x is an increase of about 0.1x per year in dollars of constant value. That's not a 10% salary increase every single year- it's 10% of initial salary, plus inflation. This is close to zdas04's observations, and is a mean with a lot of scatter I'm sure.

As far as starting salaries, zdas04 is also accurate based on our salary survey data. Engineering starting salaries have roughly doubled between 1990 and 2015, whereas the consumer price index in Canada increased only 61% in that period. But that's only a rough doubling- I don't have the exact figures. Engineers' salaries have increased faster than inflation- but not greatly faster, and not by enough to support any evidence of shortage- in fact the data is massively inclined in the other direction, pointing toward a huge oversupply of engineering candidates which you would expect to decrease starting salary expectations. I suspect that the reason salary expectations have not decreased has a lot to do with a continued decline in the premium between an engineer's salary and the salaries of other fields that an engineering Bachelor's grad might be qualified to do: as an example, the median salary for an Ontario teacher is the same as the median salary of Level D (minimum 10 yrs experience) engineers in Ontario once you adjust to equalize the number of days worked in the year.

I believe that zdas04's observation that starting salaries have crept up a little faster and the increase curve between year 1 and year ten has compressed a bit is accurate here too, but it isn't a strong enough trend to be obvious in the data.

 

[jd90]

Thank you all for the replies, glad to have sparked off a debate!

I will be pursuing an engineering career and focusing specifically in an area I am interested. A lot of schemes appear to hold you in a technical position for several years then offer you the option of moving up to management if you are suitable. So I have some time to think about it at least

 

[ScottyUK]

You probably need to be looking the pay offered in job ads in a specific area of industry which you are interested in, rather than looking at surveys. The IET salary survey has never borne much resemblance to my experiences, and I doubt that the IMechE one is much better.

I'll get in a fair bit of bother at work if I publish actual salary data on here but in rough figures I'm about five times up on my first position in the mid 1990's, if I discount the 9 months where I took literally anything to get experience. That first few months I was making no more than I had in my bar job I'd worked all through university, except that I was learning a lot of very transferable skills: the early 1990's was a really bad time to graduate as an electrical power engineer, into the immediate aftermath of the privatisation / decimation of the CEGB and the regional electricity boards. Today my generation is virtually missing from the industry and employers are paying a premium to employ the few of us that there are. Today I see young engineers starting in the industry on salaries I could only dream of, even allowing for inflation. Stick with it, this is a good time to be an engineer in the UK.

 

[moltenmetal]

Basic wage inflation here has driven salaries up 2x, and going from a starting engineer to a senior one gets you 2x in dollars of constant value. So that's 4x, ScottyUK. You're at about 5x, but I don't know how your consumer price index has increased over the past 20-25 yrs. So you're doing well- but not so well to indicate that you're in a true shortage-driven industry. I don't doubt you are, I'm just saying that the salary data you've given doesn't show much evidence of it. Real shortages cause salaries to double. Your increase level probably implies a significant increase in responsibility as well, which many achieve but some do not. My numbers are based on means of course, and people do vary significantly about the mean in both directions.