• Question: Do you get paid well as an engineer?

    Asked by nhswillr1 to Alex, Claire, Kate, Marcus, Neil on 20 Jun 2014.
    • Photo: Marcus Johns

      Marcus Johns answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Engineers can expect to be paid pretty well. A graduate engineer will typically earn between £18-33,000 (the average being £25,000) depending on the sector that you go into – oil and gas companies typically pay the most – and how large the company is.

      Becoming a chartered engineer leads to the salary effectively doubling with the average pay being around £55,000. The best paid engineers can earn over £100,000 with the top 10% earning over £105,000.

      Further details can be found at http://targetjobs.co.uk/career-sectors/engineering/284465-engineering-salary-round-up-from-graduate-to-chartered-engineer if you’re interested.

    • Photo: Neil Dhir

      Neil Dhir answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      I agree with all the points that Marcus has made. Basically, engineering is a well paid job, and it pays even better (I am generalising here), the bigger your company is.

      For example, I used to work at a company as an engineering intern. This is a huge company operating in the oil and gas sector. They had more money than they knew what to do with. So everything, consequently, was free. All the coffee machines were free, the food was free and they even had a free coffee bar. It was quite amazing actually but I became quite addicted to coffee following that internship.

    • Photo: Claire Brockett

      Claire Brockett answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Hi nhswillr1
      Engineers are generally quite well paid compared with other jobs – an average engineering salary is higher than the national average. It does vary depending on your role and level of responsibility though. Academic engineers in general get paid slightly less than industry engineers – but again this varies across companies and the type of engineering.
      As Marcus said – chartered engineers tend to get paid a bit more – although I’ve recently seen quite a few chartered engineers disputing the apparent benefit – most would say they earn less than £55 ooo!
      I guess the other thing to consider is job satisfaction – I get paid to do a job that I love, that I never find boring and that I enjoy almost every day – and can afford to buy a house/drive a car and do the things I enjoy outside of work, so I get paid plenty 🙂

    • Photo: Alex Lyness

      Alex Lyness answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Hey nhswillr1,

      You can definitely get well paid as an engineer and do not let anyone tell you otherwise!

      Me and my best friend did engineering at different Universities, when we graduated he chose to work in finance because an Accountant had told he he couldn’t earn more than £40,000 in Engineering. How wrong he was!

      He opted to work in Finance in London and did go on to earn a lot of money. However, he recently quit his job as he was bored in Finance and wanted to go back to trying something that was hands on/problem solving/technical. He had good money (more than me) but poor job satisfaction.

      Once well qualified and experience, good engineers are very sought after and earning over £40,000 by mid-thirties should not be a problem. If only my friend knew at the time he could have been an engineer for an extra 5 years!

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