Taking the Measure

At EDN, we are analyzing data from a salary and job-satisfaction survey of electrical engineers worldwide. We’ll publish the results next month. But by coincidence, I just got a call from a reporter at Monster.com who wanted to talk about salary trends among electrical engineers.

I couldn’t divulge specific information from the forthcoming report on our global survey, but there are some interesting results worth commenting on in the August issue of IEEE Spectrum ("Engineers Are Doing Well by Doing Good," p. 64), which survey various engineering disciplines. Practitioners in computer science scored the highest salaries—at $90,000 for systems engineers and $80,000 for applications engineers. Electrical engineers came in at about $82,000—less than chemical engineers, at just under $85,000. Mechanical and civil engineers each averaged about $75,000. (The Spectrum article cites IEEE-USA as well as the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Association of Colleges and Employers.)

Within the EE category, engineers involved in communications technologies scored highest, with salaries at $115,000. Almost as high are those involved in the “signal and applications” specialty, which I would assume is closely related to communications. Low on the list were energy and power engineering, industrial applications, and systems and controls.

There is an anomaly in the results printed in the August Spectrum: the salary for the lowest paid EE specialty—energy and power—is at Just over $90,000 higher than the cited $82,000 average salary for all EEs. I’ve not seen a correction or clarification subsequent issues. In addition, the $82,000 figure seems low in comparison with what we are finding as we analyze our US survey data.

In any event, the trends in subspecialties seem right to me, with communications specialists benefiting from wireless infrastructure rollout and other innovations in the communications area. But specialists in power engineering, industrial applications, and systems and controls might get a boost in coming years as utilities roll out smart-grid technologies and as green-minded industries adopt electronics technology to improve energy efficiencies. I would also expect that engineers with multidisciplinary skills (mechanical and electrical, for example) will have an advantage in the next few years.

Of course, it’s hard to predict how the economic meltdown now going on will affect anything. The only comment I’ve heard was a pundit (I didn’t catch his name) on CNN saying that now is not a particularly bad time to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs always have a hard time borrowing money, he said, so the current credit freeze doesn’t affect them.

I’ll have more to say on salaries and job satisfaction when we publish EDN survey results, including commentary on the responses of our EDN Asia, EDN China, EDN Europe, and EDN Japan readers. Meanwhile, you can check out test-engineering salaries in Test & Measurement World’s 2008 salary survey.