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!

 

[ScottyUK]

Hi moltenmetal,

You're right. I think there are a few contributing factors:

[ol 1]
[li]Unfortunately we have no protection of the engineering title, with the consequence that all manner of blaggers and bluffers can get work as an engineer in the UK.[/li]
[li]There are just about enough old guys with grey hair and a lucrative hobby working as consultants during their retirement to keep staff engineer wages down for another year or two. There's a lot of knowledge leaving this industry forever and the management of the UK haven't quite grasped that these consultants simply aren't going to be there in ten years time.[/li]
[li]There are some very qualified and very capable engineers from Eastern Europe, notably Poland, who are working in the UK as part of the EU's free movement policy. They're arguably a contributing factor in holding down salaries because they are filling the gaps to some extent and preventing the shortage reaching crisis point. Their grasp of mathematics and physics is amazing - the Polish education system must be very strong in the physical sciences. The UK's education system could learn a lot about teaching these subjects.[/li]
[li]There are some pronounced regional differences in the UK, with forsaken places like London commanding quite a premium. In the North-East where I live we've just seen another of our big employers - the steelworks - close. The plant closures keep topping up the market with engineers every now and then. If our governments would support our industries instead of trying to kill them off then the shortage would be more pronounced around here.[/li]
[li]As a nation we have massively de-industrialised and de-nationalised since I was a young 'un, and the demand for engineers has fallen away at a terrific rate. In my relatively short lifetime I've watched my home town lose shipbuilding, mining, turbine and generator manufacture, seen the power plants close and am now watching my adopted home lose steelmaking, bulk chemicals, and power generation.[/li]
[/ol]

I clearly remember our power systems lecturer telling us that the few of us who studied the 'old' subjects like transmission and electrical machines would one day we'd be in demand, and when we graduated into a nightmare job market we called him a liar and worse. He was right, but wrong about the timescales.

 

[IRstuff]

I think pretty much everyone from former USSR states and Hong Kong had strong educations. I remember a junior high transfer from Hong Kong who had Algebra in 6th grade, while we only got started on Algebra in 8th grade

TTFN
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
homework forum: //

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faq731-376 forum1529

 

[KENAT]

Back in the UK we started Algebra in the '6th grade' as I recall (first year of senior school, the school year most of us turned 12) though it was very much an intro.

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​

 

[Terratek]

I started at 47K (USD) out of school during the great recession in 2009. I'm making not quite double that with salary and bonus this year and that is based on a bonus roughly 12.5% my salary. I'm not a star, but I'm pretty good at what I do. I would do about the same at any competitor companies based on some casual job fishing I've done.

I think the most important thing is to live below your means, stay or get out of debt and save money. Pretty much any job/career is pretty bearable when you've got no debt and some money in the bank.

Even as an entry level engineer, you can do this and still have a decent lifestyle. You may suffer a bit more with student loans if you have them. The key to happiness, in my opinion, is not being financially leashed to your job, wherever you may work, whatever you may do. I made the mistake of getting a little too comfortable with my job (which is a pretty decent job to have) and made some financial decisions based on the typical long term employment expectations. Lately, I've come to realize that I will likely not be content staying in the same career path for the next 20 years. So, now I'm aggressively paying off all debt besides the mortgage and will then aggressively save money once the debt is cleared (mostly student loans I put off to free up money to buy rental houses). My goal is to get all non-income-producing debt but the mortgage paid off and a year's worth of expenses saved up within the next couple of years so I can try my hand at self employment.

 

[moltenmetal]

Terratek: my dad used to say that money was the least important thing in life- unless you didn't have enough of it for your basic needs. Then it suddenly becomes the only thing that matters!

Money will own you if you let it. Don't give it that power.

Your strategy is the same as mine was: get the money monkey off your back and keep it off, so money can be the least important thing in life again rather than the source of constant worry. Demand to be paid what you're worth (including spending some effort to understand that in an employer's terms), live below your means, stay away from debt (easier in Canada than in the US because we don't have mortgage interest tax deductibility to seduce us), and once you have money, invest rather than gambling (i.e. don't play individual stocks).

The biggest tool in that battle at the beginning is a money market account with an automatic deduction from your chequing account, set for the day after your paycheque is deposited. Crank that auto-deduct amount up until it hurts a bit and you start to feel poor again. Use that account to pay off debt, then to accumulate a downpayment.

Once the money monkey is gone, you are free to pursue your career without fear, rather than feeling like an indentured servant.

 

[moltenmetal]

ScottyUK: your analysis matches what I've observed. Employers squawk about not being able to find the people they need "on the hoof", but any small localized labour market vacuum seems to draw in sufficient "good enough" people to blunder through the work under the guidance of the few experienced ones that remain. It also keeps the older folks from completely retiring, so they can provide the guidance when it's needed. The elimination of mandatory retirement at 65 here in Canada, which happened very quietly indeed and without any meaningful public debate, has been a contributing factor in mitigating the effects of the demographic shift.

Our experience is that we can work far more easily and successfully with the raw material of fresh local graduates than we can with experienced engineers who have been work-hardened in another industry. When we use the co-op process to sift through the dross for the gold amongst the fresh grads, the results can be exceptionally good. But it takes a longer term hiring philosophy to make that a success. When we grow in reaction to a peak in workload rather than by choice, we bring in temporary people who tend to become part of the furniture. The quality of the team can suffer over time as a result.

 

[allgoodnamestaken]

live below your means, stay away from debt, and once you have money, invest

I think this is the key, in the long run. Many people get a raise and then raise their lifestyle to match their new income. Once you hit a level of income where you aren't worrying about making your bills the next month, stay that way. If you live below your means and avoid taking on unnecessary debt, in the long run you will have less stress.

 

[beej67]

Make as much money as possible, then do what you're passionate about in your spare time. Just make sure you have that spare time to spend.


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[moltenmetal]

Damned straight, beej67! At any particular time, I've found that it's easy to be missing either the money, spare time or motivation/emotional energy to properly enjoy your life by pursuing your other passions- and yes, you need some outside of work to remain sane! Your job can sap you of all three if you let it. Just like the good-cheap-fast triangle of procurement, you need to pick one that is most important and one that is 2nd, as getting all three in equally satisfactory measure is really difficult.