Working hard for their money
Today's design engineers are doing far more than ever before
Elizabeth M. Taurasi, Managing Editor -- Design News, July 16, 2006
Here are the results of our exclusive, annualDesign News salary survey. While salaries didn't fluctuate too much from last year, we discovered you guys are doing a whole lot more to get to collect that paycheck.
Engineers earned an average of $73,000 last year, with the majority receiving a 3 percent increase over last year. Eighty-three percent of those surveyed stayed in the same job.
On average, engineers are working 46 hours per week and more than 40 percent have a bachelor's degree in engineering.
But to earn that paycheck, you're doing more than ever.
From taking on supervisory and budgetary functions to learning new skill sets, to broadening their responsibilities, today's design engineers are doing far more than they ever had before.
Roughly 50 percent say they are working in more areas than they did a year ago.
Kody Baker, a 28-year-old mechanical engineer agrees, "Yes, we are doing far more than just designing products," he says. He's a project manager, manufacturing engineer, product designer, R&D engineer, test engineer, CAD systems specialist, CAD instructor/mentor, and more, juggling many roles in his job as a mechanical application engineer at Honeywell.
Art Radomski, a mechanical engineer with Canberra Industries Inc. said he's learning new skills in a variety of different disciplines including: plastic injection molding, metal injection molding and casting design, as well as project management and FEA modeling and analysis, to name a few. The list, he says, is ongoing and has come about recently since the merger of several smaller divisions into his facility.
"It's time away from home," he says. "It's a lot of learning and it's a never-ending process."
| 2006 Design News Salary Survey | ||
 To view our full 2006 Design News Salary Survey, click here. For a limited time, this Survey, a $295.00 Value is free complements of Aerotek.
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He attributes his company's entry into different markets and the need to develop new products as the reason engineers like himself need to acquire more design disciplines.
So here's a look at how well engineers fared last year in overall salary and compensation, overall job satisfaction, and keeping up with all the new technology trends they need to learn.
Getting Ahead
With 36 percent of engineers saying they have both supervisory and budgetary responsibility, the majority of them say communication/presentation and project management skills are critical to getting ahead in their profession today.
Eighty-six percent surveyed say both project management and communication/presentation skills are most important, followed by computer skills (85 percent), team-building skills (64 percent), language skills (43 percent), marketing/sales skills (35 percent), and finance/accounting skills (31 percent).
"Presentation skills are important because it allows engineers to be able to explain to their audience, whether it's sales, marketing or a client, what it is they have that the other wants. Same thing with management," says Rick Johnson, president of Cherry Electrical Products.
As far as budgets go, Johnson says not only do today's engineers have to be able to put together budgets and schedules, along with specifications, but they need to be able to deliver them. "And it all comes back to the leadership issue — which is a measure of your overall effectiveness," he says.
With regard to leadership skills, Johnson says many companies tend to promote people with who have been with the company a the longest into management and pay them more than the technical folks. Many engineers, according to Johnson, are untrained and unprepared for this transition.
"My experience is that all companies prefer technical people in these positions," he says. "The opportunity here for an engineer to continue in engineering is to add to his/her leadership skills. All engineers are taught to solve problems. If an engineer pursues acquiring leadership skills … they will have huge opportunities in store for them in the future. Alas, most engineers just ignore this aspect of their personal development preferring instead to learning more and more about the latest technologies."
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