• Question: how much is your average wage and have you ever struggled to get work ? Also what is so good about engineering??

    Asked by jordwallis2012 to Amit, Emily, Joanne, Martin, Paige on 14 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Emily Bullen

      Emily Bullen answered on 13 Mar 2012:


      The starting salary for most engineers is around £28,000, which can rise to £60,000 during a career, depending on how ambitious you are.
      I personally haven’t struggled to get work, I graduated in 2007, before the job market started to get more tricky. Engineers have a better chance than most at getting a job, but it’s still not given that you’ll get the job you like without trying too hard. Having said that, all the people I know have jobs they are happy with.
      For me, engineering is all based around solving problems, designing things, and understanding things, and that’s why I like it. I could be asked to work on something I know nothing about, but with a bit of looking around and using what I know on other things, I’m very quickly able to get up to speed.

    • Photo: Joanne Davies

      Joanne Davies answered on 13 Mar 2012:


      Hello jordwallis2012. Nice to see you here again.

      I am not sure what my average wage is, because I’m too lazy to do the maths.

      I have never struggled to find work as an engineer.
      I did struggle to find jobs I enjoyed before I became an engineer though.

      What’s so good about engineering? – There are lots of good things. Too many things to list here but everything you see around you (apart from nature) is made by engineers. That includes your house, phone, TV, medicines, facebook, internet, schools, cars, cameras, roads, music, fuel, machines, desks, chairs, youtube, computers, insulin pumps, books, iPods, sport equipment, football stadiums and all sorts of other things I can’t fit here. But that means there is more choice for jobs than any other career. It’s no wonder there is a shortage of engineers! 🙂

    • Photo: Paige Brown

      Paige Brown answered on 13 Mar 2012:


      My current salary as a student is $24,000. Some engineering graduate student earn up to $35,000 dollars a year! Engineers can make a lot of money… depending on how much education you have, you can begin to make over $100,000 dollars a year.

      But I don’t think that the best thing about an engineering education is the money. I think that the coolest thing about being an engineer is that you can do so many different things with an engineering degree! If you go into engineering, you have a lot of flexibility as far as what job you want to get! That is the coolest thing to me.

    • Photo: Martin Wallace

      Martin Wallace answered on 14 Mar 2012:


      When I started engineering, the starting salary was £22,500 which has gone up now. It is quite a well paid industry.
      I’ve been lucky too that I’ve never been looking for work for very long. At the moment it seems there are lots of jobs for well trained engineers, I still get emails from all sorts of industries asking if I want to consider applying for a job (I’m really happy in my current job so don’t want to move), so there is a very wide range of jobs you can get involved in.
      The advice I would have is that whatever job you are in, if you find it is not the career for you and you really want to leave, then it would be better for you to find a job you do enjoy – however I don’t think you should leave a job before you have been offered another job to go to. It is a lot harder and more depressing to be looking for a job if you are unemployed than if you have a job already.

    • Photo: Amit Pujari

      Amit Pujari answered on 14 Mar 2012:


      Luckily, I never struggled to get work. For my first job in the britain salary was around £28,000.

      On an average, engineers can expect decent salary. Graduate salary can range from £25,000 to £28,000 and peak salaries can go to £60,000/£70,000. But for earning very high salaries you need to have lot of (years of) experience.

      In a way, engineering could be a really good choice for a career (even if you only think of wages). And chances of engineer struggling for a job are quite less.

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