Engineers are the creative forces driving new product development in the electronics industry, and their well-being is important to the continued prosperity of the sector. This year, ECN decided to measure several key metrics in the engineering profession, namely salary and career satisfaction. We surveyed hundreds of engineers and received 378 responses. Here are the main findings from the survey:
Typical Engineer Profile
The engineers who responded, for the most part, are highly experienced, typically work in large companies with 1,000 or more employees, and are male.
More than 37 percent of respondents have more than 35 years of engineering experience, while another 28 percent had more than 25 years of experience. Although there’s anecdotal evidence of engineers leaving the field because they want to pursue other opportunities or have difficulty finding work, the readers we surveyed have largely remained in the profession.
Two interesting trends emerged here. Very small companies (with fewer than 10 employees) constituted almost a quarter of respondents, while 35.6 percent of respondents were part of companies with 1,000 or more employees. While large, well-known firms such as Intel, Apple, Texas Instruments, AMD, and Micron remain bastions of employment, there are many tiny firms—possibly startups formed by engineers formerly with medium and large firms―dotting the engineering landscape seeking to pioneer the next breakthrough in electronics.
The number of females in the engineering profession remain statistically very low, according to the ECN survey. Given that survey respondents tend to be older and highly experienced, the results likely do not reflect recent efforts to recruit more females into the engineering profession.
How Much Do Engineers Make?
The engineers we surveyed have worked in the industry for many years, and in line with their expertise, tend to be well compensated. Salary compression, though, is keeping salaries stagnant.
Of 365 respondents, slightly more than 45 percent earned more than $100,000, including 20 percent that earned more than $130,000. The smallest percentage (11.78 percent) earned less than $40,000. Engineering has historically shown to be one of the highest paying professions for recent college graduates, and the survey results reflect a continuation of that trend.
While engineering salaries are high, they have been relatively stagnant for the last year, which is perhaps a reflection of tight budgets or conservative spending by companies. Almost 80 percent of respondents replied that their pay has been either flat or less than 5 percent higher than a year ago. Less than 1 percent of respondents saw their salary jump by more than 20 percent, which is likely partially attributed to engineers switching firms.
What Do the Engineers Do?
Befitting ECN’s audience, the readers we surveyed are design engineers who reside in the trenches of product development for a variety of industries.
Not surprisingly, design and development is the key engineering function, with more than 40 percent of respondents saying this is their role. The next largest role is research and development (less than 16 percent).
The variety of industries our readers developed products for is wide-ranging. The largest percentage of respondents for a specific sector was industrial (23.47 percent), followed by consumer (18.67 percent). A quarter of respondents classified their end products as “other,” which encompassed areas such as transportation, energy, educational services, and consulting.
Career Satisfaction
Engineering is considered by many to be a difficult, demanding profession, but our readers relished the challenge. A majority of our readers replied that engineering was a satisfying career. Still, as with any other profession, there are pitfalls that respondents called out.
Just under 39 percent of our readers expressed satisfaction with their current position, with another 31.5 percent stating they were somewhat satisfied. Only 3.7 percent said they were very dissatisfied.
Many factors contributed to job dissatisfaction. Fourteen percent of respondents said inadequate pay was the main reason for job dissatisfaction. Another 14.6 percent cited long hours as their predominant reason for job dissatisfaction. But the biggest obstacle for job satisfaction was poor management (18.11 percent), which is noted from some of the individual responses contributed to other career dissatisfaction issues, such as inadequate staffing and unclear career growth.
Respondents did not hold management in high esteem. While one-third of respondents (33.86 percent) said management was somewhat responsive, a quarter (25.13 percent) said management needed to be more responsive.