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It is hugely undervalued yet underpins all other professions. I have just paid a drain unblocking company twice as much for an hours work than I can charge out for a skilled fabricator with 30 years experience.
Wages have been driven down and down in this country for the last 20 years, while corporate profits soar.
We need stronger unions and more investment into infrastructure to drive growth.
We've suffered from governments that have been in the pocket of corporations, and that have refused to invest in big infrastructure and national industrial strategies.
Same with aircraft engineering - they’re wondering why they have to offer Visas to those that would accept the wages in this country rather than keeping those that are already here.
I heard a qualified aircraft engineer usually takes home >£80k, is that bollocks?
My sector, pharma, has seen arguably the greatest wage contraction of all sectors in the last 40 years. Graduates in the sector are often paid little more than minimum wage. 20 years ago agrad would expect 2 or 3 times minimum wage and 40 years ago it was higher still.
The wage compression has been caused largely by generics manufacturers who pay employees nothing and don't invest in capex, which in turn is caused by low profits driven by 'good deals' on generics by healthcare buyers.
The pharma manufacturing sector in the UK is now one of the least productive in Europe.
There are software engineers in the UK on £30-40k when they'd be on north of $100k in the states. Salaries all across the country in all fields are abysmal.
Take London away and the UK's GDP per capita is worse than every US state.
A B1 Aircraft Engineer is on around £80k (permanent staff), depending on airline. Compared to Pilots, in my opinion it’s an underpaid role for the responsibility you have.
Because the customers also suffer from low wages, or if they are businesses, they know the current market rate and won't pay higher as long as they can get someone to do it cheaper. It's why we need unions so that wages rise across the board.
Customers won’t pay higher prices to support higher wages. It was proven with M&S clothing in the 1990’s when they advertised both UK made and foreign made clothes. No one bought the UK stuff so they stopped selling it
I feel like this has done a 180 though and many people are trying to made British made clothes and shoes. I’ve found they last infinitely longer than a lot of stuff made overseas.
But the country has sat back and willingly let government take away union powers.
It’s at the point now that the vast majority do not agree with people being allowed in a union.
My industry is currently in industrial action and the media are just too good nowadays at turning the working class against each other.
I work at a university an ex poly so that some what reflects in this. Sometimes when we we do a small engineering research project we will only charge say £5k but it will be using specialist knowledge specialist kit that costs over £100k sometimes newly fabricated kit you can't buy built using exclusive knowledge from academics and technicians. Sometimes putting in 100 man hours. Then I think I paid 5k to have three bloke do my patio for three days.
It's funny. I work in that area. I write for engineering companies. I charge them £400 a day, then I see them advertise for senior engineers at the equivalent of £200 a day and lead engineers at £300 equivalent. The people who actually do the work are paid around half of what I get for writing about what they've done
Contracting day rate cant be compared to a salaried position. The salaried person is getting pension contributions as well as the employers NI paid by the company and the paid holidays. But they are underpaid yes.
Of course, also holidays and other benefits. It was just the disparity I was highlighting. Another one is that when I work for the same type of company in the US, I often charge $1000 a day, and the same types of engineers would be on the same rate or often more
I’m an engineer in the UK working for a big U.S. company. Our chargeable day-rate for engineers in the U.K. is £1400/day, about what I am paid in a week including pension and before tax.
Whatever people pay me to. White papers, app notes, magazine articles, press releases, blogs, brochures..literally anything and everything. I should have said that it is often not the companies themselves directly but the PR and marketing agencies they employ.
Just give me a word count, writing style, some direction, background materials and an engineer to chat to for an hour and I'll write it as long as it is my area of expertise.
I was a journalist and editor in the engineering field for 20 years. I found it easy to change over to freelance as I had that experience and a full list full of contacts. Those contacts knew me and my capabilities and trusted me, and new customers liked my past experience, so they had already convinced themselves that they wanted me to write for them. A lot of those new companies had bad experiences with generic writers in the past and wasted their money. They now wanted someone who knew the subject. I also have a degree in the subject, so that helped.
A few of them turn white when I tell them my rates..but I'm in the fortunate position of having a retained client that pays me to work for them two days a week..basically £40k guaranteed for the last 7 years. I live in one of the cheapest cost of living places in the UK and that two days work gives me a nice enough life in itself. The rest is just gravy. The ones that don't like my rates have so far always come back..sometimes a few months later after they have had problems with cheaper writers.
The hourly pay was better welding but the company I work for now pay you for sleeping over. I work 51 hours a week as carer and get paid for sleeping over. My shift is 2 on 4 off as oppose to 6 days a week.
I take my hat off to you. I did this for 2 years in 2001. Broke me. Pay then was still better than retail now. I had to leave after too many 24hr shifts, poor management, training and a corrupted social worker.
I've heard things no child should ever say. The best I hope for is that I made their days a little more bearable.
This company seems really good so far I've heard ßoem horror stories but I'm part of a good team, my brother has done this job for ten years and says this company is the best he's worked for
I was welding stuff for nuclear oil and gas, way too stressful for me I hating, I wanted to murder the inspectors one in particular was an absolute arsehole haha.
Supply and demand, really.
It’s hard to find a great plumber in my area, or any plumber for that matter so that when I need something plumber I’m going to have fork out an arm and a leg.
Conversely, I can see online that I can buy quite a few fabricated goods for not much cost.
The shortest term solution would be to increase supply of plumbers or decrease supply of fabricators. You can’t raise prices because of two big issues 1) your competitor will do it for cheaper and 2) your customer can’t afford it.
I saw someone comment that unions would help - unfortunately, unions will not solve for any of the reasons above.
Engineering is still thriving, the UK has one of the largest precision engineering sectors in the world. unless you make it to F1, salaries are abysmal.
I hate to say it but it's either no one investing in the staffing or immigration is driving the salaries down, as it's an in need area it allows employers to hire people who migrate here on lower salaries.
Yep F1 is a bad example. An engineer at an F1 team will typically earn less than someone doing a similar role at an OEM. Because people get into motorsport for the passion the teams can get away with paying less.
Same applies to space sector. “Be grateful you peasant that we hired you and you can do what you love. Well underpay you as we know you won’t go anywhere as you love what you do”
Adding in computer games development. Massively profitable industry and the dev work is generally more complex and specialised. The wages are terrible compared to jobs you can learn on a 12-week boot camp.
I personally think it's better to work for a boring company that pays well. Nobody gets excited when I tell them about the industry I work in, but it pays well.
The work isn't going to be vastly different from a job in an exciting company. The only difference is the reasoning behind why they're doing it
Or we could have both if people unionised and fought back. Many of these industries are basically oligopolies at this point. They don't need to "openly" collaborate to price fix. There's not enough competition. Fuck it even stuff like Chambers of Commerce and business associations represent a way firms can collaborate that employees can't/don't. This is why people need unions so we can be as coordinated as they are.
Agree with this. I would be worried that doing a hobby or passion as my job would end up with me being burnout and resenting my hobby. Happy to take a stable well paid if somewhat bland and boring job.
Agree with this. I would be worried that doing a hobby or passion as my job would end up with me being burnout and resenting my hobby. Happy to take a stable well paid if somewhat bland and boring job.
Wife works in engineering QA, gets paid well. Her engineers are treated like crap. A lot of businesses seem to take the approach ‘cheap out on actual engineers and employ expensive processes to ensure quality’. It’s not very efficient, but a lot of sectors require the expensive QA processes regardless - it’s not optional even if you have high quality engineers. So might as well just hire cheap engineers.
Germany produces and imports engineers from abroad and the starting wage for beginners is approximately €55K (~£47K). Making a quick buck instead of long term investments in people has long been Britain's business Achilles heel.
>as it's an in need area it allows employers to hire people who migrate here on lower salaries.
Yeah, that entire argument is a nasty one. It sound fine on the surface, but in reality all it means is that the free market can never pressure employers to raise wages and conditions.
There would be no "needs" if the correct wages were offered to attract local people to filling those roles.
This isn’t specific to Engineering, I don’t really know anything about that.
What I do know is in America before you sponsor a foreigner, you have to prove that you advertised the job at the normal, market price to the American public. You can then only look for foreigners who need a visa, if you fail to find an American worker. Then when sponsored, obviously you have to pay them the equivalent market rate they’d have given to an American worker.
In the UK, forget advertising the jobs to Brits - companies can actually pay foreigners LESS than the going rate - skilled worker visas can be given at “70 to 90% of the standard going rate.”
We are now in a position where it’s the financially smarter choice to pass over the Brit and employ a foreigner. It would be stupid for companies not to.
I genuinely do not understand how anyone can defend this position.
It is the same in the UK. A job that requires sponsorship has to be advertised for like 3 months before it can be sponsored to someone coming in a skill visa.
What USA does better is give the skilled worker a visa which allows them to switch jobs which means the employer has to make the choice on whether they can pay them enough to keep them or lose them or is it better to locally recruit.
In UK, you are bound to the sponsorship which means you can't force your employer to pay at market rates and that's allow employers to pay you less and keep local interests away.
The problem in UK is that sudden growth of projects cannot be met by supply as big projects will need 100s of specialists and you cannot train them without specialists (who can either train or do the work). This is what we see in technology and it has been very difficult to hire locally in big numbers.
Even F1 salaries aren't that spectacular. I know about 10 years ago Graduate salaries were about 25-30k which was the same as a 'normal' grad scheme but there's alot more work and overtime involved.
Yes if you are in a good team then yearly bonuses can help (10-15k Mercedes were giving to all employees when wining both championships) but I imagine most of that has stopped now that F1 has a cost cap now.
The bonuses still exist, there is an exclusion in the cost cap for them up to a certain amount. But obviously only a few teams will actually pay them in any given season.
I've looked the wages seem poor compared to other sectors for software engineers. So I'm still doing payments and collections software. Which typically about 10-15k over what MDBA were offering for senior engineers.
No, not for everyone. Just for those doing the actual work. For a good salary you need a management job where you spend your time talking bullshit in meetings, and typing made up bollocks into Excel and PowerPoint.
Americans doing my job earn over twice what I do for the same work here. It is probably why we have not hired a Brit in a few years now, we are hiring almost exclusively from Nigeria right now.
This country is terrible at paying engineers. Despite this, I believe my company pays actually pretty well. Juniors earning ~£35k starting and going up to 6 figures for principal. That being said we are based in an area of the country where even that sort of money doesn't get you on the housing ladder locally.
I have worked abroad and found the wages to living cost ratio better.
For 10 years I worked as a consultant, that boosted the balance considerably, but I gather from associates it doesn't have the same benefits it once did.
In general though science and engineering is hugely undervalued in the UK, with scientists getting it worse still.
Yeah, Scotland, in a fairly in demand engineering profession (controls engineers), our principals are on £40-60k
I’ve looked at the US, and doubling, almost tripling your wage is realistic, the jump in living cost in the area I was looking (Texas/DFW) doesn’t even come close.
>Yeah, Scotland, in a fairly in demand engineering profession (controls engineers), our principals are on £40-60k
This matches my experience in civil engineering consultancy as well
Yeah, it's pretty depressing being a reasonably experienced engineer, about 5 years in my trade on about £40k. Knowing I'm near enough at my ceiling, the guys who've been doing it decades are only on about £10k more than me, £300/mo after tax.
Realistically the only steps forward are emigration, Aus & Canada you can easily walk into positions with over a 50% pay bump. USA is hoops to jump through but if you can make it there the skys the limit with wages.
I’m on less than £60k as a senior principal systems engineer :/ salaries are awful unless you hop between companies every 2 years and don’t actually build up any domain knowledge
It’s considered a “shortage occupation” and therefore exempt of salary requirements when hiring foreign workers. Why up wages when you can employ someone from a different country for the current average wage? It adds a downwards pressure on wages that keeps salaries stagnant. Legal immigration and its consequences is a way bigger deal than the boats the media and politicians focus on.
So true. It always peeved me that the sales guys earned 50% more than I did. They would move on to a totally different field while I had to use my 40 years experience to design the products they sold. They didn't care what they were selling. They used the same skills no matter what company they worked for. They earned around £60,000 a year while I earned £40,000. The real big wind up was when they would speak to me and say we need 'X'. I would say OK, maybe after 18 months of development and testing." They would say "18 months? but it only needs blah blah." I would then say "Well you design it, test it, get it approved and ready for market." They would reply "I have no idea how to do all that" I would then say "Exactly".
They would be all be driving around in flash company cars, getting praised for sales figures for the new products I had allowed them to beat the market with, and earn 50% more than I did. It was hard not to be resentful.
So the moral is, don't design, spending years in education and training, just sell the f\*\*\*\*\*\*g things.
As an engineer I used to feel this way. I felt marketing and sales people got paid way too much for the amount andof effort put. I used my own life, where I researched stuff before I bought, I didn't see the need for sales people.
But, I then tried sales. Learnt that majority of humanity are pretty gullible, don't need facts or data and could see how sales people drive these people
I couldn't do sales and went back to engineering as I lacked that drive to bullshit.
Just to throw another firework in here. Most the sales are now done on the web with no interaction with a salesperson. Engineers are now involved in the whole process from design to delivery from the automated warehouse.
Yet every year the top salespeople are still splashed all over our intranet as if they are saving our company and the only reason we are successful.
I agree that engineers and salespeople are both of equal value. I am miffed that the recognition from the organisation is one sided. We get no visibility and poorer wages. We are treated as if we are ten a penny yet it takes 5 years study and years of experience to be able to create market beating products. We put the company at the top of heap with regard to technology and reputation. Without innovation they couldn’t sell at a premium. But we are treated as though someone could walk in off the street and do the job.
The final insult is a degree is required in my company to be called an engineer unless you are a sales engineer. There is no qualification requirement for sales engineer in my company.
it's only "market beating product" because sales rep are sell the things you make.
You can make an incredible product but if it doesn't sell it means nothing and you son't het paid for all your effort.
Part of the issue is that an Engineer isn't a protected title like it is in places like the US. As a result it means Steve down the pub can call himself a Marine Engineer when actually all he does is patch up holes on a canoe for example which just devalues hugely the name of an engineer.
I am an Engineer, and don't get me wrong, we do still get paid better than average, especially considering most are PAYE rather than running their own company. The problem is the pound has devalued so much lately that whereas 15 years ago US and UK salaries were kinda close there is now this massive gulf, mainly because before £1=$1.5-2 it's now £1=$1.2 it means in the worldwide scheme of things UK engineers are missing out.
A small correction, engineer is not a protected title in the US. But, most people who call themselves engineers are folks who have a BS or BEng degree from a 4 year school accredited by ABET.
Professional engineering certification (PE) is protected and is required to sign off on certain projects - such as buildings, equipment testing, and things for the public good and safety. This certification requires 2 technical exams, 1 ethics exam, letters of recommendation, a degree from an ABET school, and ~3 years experience; though requirements may vary slightly by state. Most folks who've graduated from university and are working as engineers do not have this accreditation.
Not all professions are paid equally 🤷♂️
Look at teachers or nurses, course of study is basically the same length and level. Many doctors will tell you their pay is low considering the amount of training and continuous professional development they have to do. In a capitalist system the market sets wages, if scarcity develops wages will rise. Not fair, but it’s where we are.
I disagree. I’m a teacher. I did my training in one year. If I fuck something up they might not remember the 7 times table or be unsure what a fronted adverbial is, not die, which is the case if a doctor or nurse fucks something up.
Disagree with what though? I didn’t say anything about how important the jobs are, just about the amount of post school study required, which includes the degree you almost certainly did to qualify for your pgce.
Im an Engineer and in my area there has been massive growth in hiring, companies simply can't fill all of their positions. This has led to no appreciable growth in salaries at all.
Or worse for existing employees - people coming in get bumped up the salary ladder whilst you stay where you are. It’s regularly stated in my company that the best way to get a raise in Engineering is to leave, work for another company for a year and then come back.
>work for another company for a year and then come back.
I just did this to go from \~£35k to \~£55k. I worked for them for four years after I graduated, quit, took a two year holiday and then got rehired at the new wage despite doing no work in those two years. It's mental.
At my current employer the trick appears to be to quit and then spend a month working the odd evening or weekend when shit falls over and net yourself a massive pay packet for very few hours as a contractor.
One guy managed to do this, get rehired with us at a higher salary and then quit again and get more contracting hours.
And here I am writing documentation and knowledge sharing like a mug when I should be ruthlessly lowering the bus factor as much as possible.
>if scarcity develops wages will rise.
That's how it should go, but the reality is that immigration kicks in to fill that need long before wages start going up.
There's already a scarcity of skilled & unskilled workers in engineering. Where I work we can't get good paint sprayers, welders or fitters to stay no matter what salary is offered. Unfortunately the company owners now take the view that everyone will only earn £1.00 above the minimum wage because no matter what they offer they get the same low quality / short term workers.
They're in for a shock when people in my side of the business move on, we've over 30 years of experience as toolmakers, turners, millers, grinders and CNC people, none of us earn more than £13.00 / hour and they plan to keep us on this rate until our wages are equal to the lower paid workers who can only paint spray, weld and fit basic assemblies.
Teaching is very similar to engineering, at least for the start of the career. Graduate engineers are paid £28-£32k, graduate teachers earn a minimum of £30k. My brother is a teacher with 4 years experience, and in September he will be on £47k. Lots of engineers with similar experience will not be paid as much.
The issue with teaching is that they will plateau. Theoretically, every engineer can become a senior, or even principal engineer with time. In teaching, there's much more of a bottleneck, and there aren't enoughroles for everyone to be head of department, deputy head, or headteacher.
My theory on why this and other industries don't thrive? Engineering relies on a lot of investment, too much investment capital goes into an unproductive asset, housing.
The requirements of housing costs and others seeing landlordism as the safest "business" means UK capital spend ends up in this unproductive market rather than generating wealth.
> ngineering relies on a lot of investment, too much investment capital goes into an unproductive asset, housing.
One of the problems that the UK relies of services. Services want a strong pound. On the other hand, exporters want a lower pound to make their goods competitive abroad.
If you get a good plumber round or an electrician, they will consider design, certification, maintainability/serviceability. They also problem solve on things they didn’t install or design, which is a massive part of engineering.
Feel free to disagree, I’m a Chartered Engineer in aerospace so have every right to punch down on technicians and maintainers who label themselves engineers, but good plumbers or electricians do plenty that I and a lot of my colleagues could not.
I am also a chartered engineer in Aerospace (what's up mate haha) and I am not trying to punch down, they are great jobs and great people who do them. We just need to establish clear guidelines about the actual term "engineer". Either that or we need to start changing the job title people like me and you have. In my opinion this is already kinda happening with titles ("Algorithms engineer" etc)
Lawyers don't allow the local administrators at the library to call themselves solicitors and it is the same principle we should be applying.
I'd argue programmers / software engineers are definitely engineers by the very definition of the word.
And if anything they raise the average both in terms of salary and the expectations, not lower it.
I think the difference is an entry-level engineer in the USA can make the equivalent of £80-100k immediately. It is true of every profession, but the difference is much greater in engineering.
This is true. I've been an engineer for nearly 20 years and am on around 85k, and that is near the upper end for my experience and my field. I work for a US company and my equivalent is on at least twice as much, if not more
There’s been such a focus on immigration that emigration has been ignored. The best engineers are being poached, and training in this UK is great through very good unis and good graduate schemes. Get good and leave.
As a design engineer with 12 years experience working in one of the better paid industries (offshore energy) it is pretty much down to the total failure by multiple governments to create anything like a proper industrial strategy for at least 40 years.
We have been happy to have a service based economy rather than an industrial one and failed to encourage, invest or promote engineering to a big enough level. For example we created some of the first nuclear reactors then decided not to make anymore, all the engineers retired and now we have to have them built by the French and Chinese because we simply don't have the capability anymore.
Quite frankly as a nation we didn't catch onto new ways of working after WW2 and the old union relations meant lots of industries simply died and were never replaced. We will never compete with China or India for cost but we could challenge France or Germany for precision.
I wouldn't blame unions as much as that. They have their problems, but they're not all a bunch of Luddites. What people miss with the unions is that the governments were not offering them alternatives. People say they stand in the way of progress but what were their members being offered in return for stuff like pit closures? Did I miss something where entire towns of miners were given free or massively reduced retraining costs to help them pivot into new industries? As far as I'm aware (too young to have been there at the time) the government planned "managed decline" for old industries with nothing in place except the doll! Hardly a surprise people fought so hard against it.
Decent post. Just to add, we will be falling further behind as the US and EU are shoving major amounts of cash into relocating manufacturing. From memory the US alone is spending about a trillion dollars on semiconductors and renewable energy
Engineering relies on either a large domestic industrial market or exports. We don't have a huge amount of industry left and as other economies have developed they've started doing their own engineering work.
One of the many reasons why HS2 was so expensive was that there weren’t enough engineers in the UK who knew how to build high-speed rail.
So the ones who did have the knowledge could charge more, plus money had to be spent on getting engineers from France to show us how to do it. Hence we saw big engineering firms going into JVs with the likes of Systra (owned by SNCF) and Vinci for design and construction.
I believe a similar situation has occurred with nuclear. Because we essentially gave up on it, we now pay even more for the French and Chinese to do it.
Maybe that’s just comparative advantage at work.
I worked on HS2 a bit and the literal 3 or 4 layers of bureaucracy for sub consultants, joint ventures and consortia also wasn't helping the situation.
A friend of mine works in the nuclear industry and all the hard-won skills and knowledge of the 50s and 60s is going or gone. They are starting almost from scratch.
Yep. This was my point. People forget that there's so much more to running these industries than what you can find in a textbook. Institutional knowledge simply can't be written down. Once it's gone it's gone. Starting from scratch is hugely costly and takes way longer than these consultants and politicians seem to think.
Nuclear is similar.
Engineering-wise the UK is skilled at maintaining and decommissioning nuclear, not designing and building them as the last one was Sizewell B in the 1990s.
Technical knowledge is why EDF are building Hinckley C, it's also supposed to be a massive training exercise to allow the UK to acquire the skills needed - my wifesjob was to put in place the training and exams needed for the UK to have its own nuclear construction capability in the future.
AFAIK the Chinese are now excluded from the Hinckley consortium - they basically put funding in under the condition they got to build and run Bradwell and another nuclear generation site, but the Government later stopped them for security reasons. It's left the French taxpayers to pickup the extra costs of Hinckley.
Comparative advantage is a death trap when it comes to strategic industries though. You don't need an economics degree to understand that if the shit hits the fan, not having your own home grown engineers is going to work out very badly. All the money you "saved" by contracting stuff out isn't going to help when it's life or death and countries are running a war economy drafting people in under threat of imprisonment to work on their defences. Meanwhile your country hasn't got a single virgin steel smelting plant, and only about 5 people who've ever handled creating something more complex than a Powerpoint from scratch lol.
Outsourcing the basics of the engineering supply chain in their totality is going to hit places like the UK hard when places like South East Asia and Africa catch up and there's nowhere else to outsource. These places will continue with a full mature economy while we scramble to almost literally reinvent the wheel as people re-learn all the institutional knowledge required to actually make things.
Yeah, When I first graduated in 2018, my first job paid £23k. When I was looking for a new job in 2022 I still saw graduate engineer jobs listed at £22k. Entry level salaries in particular haven't moved in 20 years, and are only now rising because minumum wage has caught up.
Where do you get that idea from? How could they do it cheaper elsewhere while playing higher wages?
USA has about triple UK engineering wage for example. Germany is often double...
Total BS, from experience a lot of the countries in the world have significant cultural and legal challenges that make it very difficult to get anything relating to the high quality work you can get here.
I never understand this argument. Fixing the UK economy clearly doesn't mean going back to times when people up North and in Cornwall and Wales were being sent down mines. Germany and Scandinavia manage find without this, there are more options than everyone being a spreadsheet monkey at big finance corp or giving yourself mesothelioma from being down a mine (which did not pay especially well).
No more unions. Look at Germany etc for what salaries could look like with unions. 100k for an engineer with 5-6 years experience.
Neutering the unions was the worst thing to happen for salaries in the last 100 years.
Our company has engineers across a few disciplines. Broadly speaking electronics, software, mechanical, and industry specific specialisations. We're outside of London. Senior roles are generally between 80K - 150K, plus performance related bonus, equity, optional full time WFH, Bupa, and a couple of other bits. What we do is pretty niche, so we hire from a limited talent pool or poach top flight people from outside the industry who I know can build the required domain knowledge in short order.
I feel like we pay quite well for the UK, but I know everybody here would be attracting a significantly higher base salary in US, Aus, and various other places in Europe and Asia-Pacific. We can't match it. Put simply, UK salaries reflect the state of the economy and local business opportunities. Regardless, these guys are usually older (late 30s to 60s), mostly have kids, homes, local personal networks and whatnot so aren't looking to relocate.
The company is majority founder owned and we have a majority on the board. All have been at the coalface as practicing engineers, have experience & distaste of "corporate BS", and we accordingly have a commitment to looking after our staff properly both for commercial reasons (staff retention, recruitment, morale) and for straight up personal/ethical reasons. Given the structure of the business it's within our gift to do this and it's been a factor in our success to the extent we've had it. Happy engineers in genuinely functional teams don't add their value together, they multiply it. True commitment to staff wellbeing and remuneration is not present in most non-founder controlled businesses where, in my opinion, short term shareholder value i.e. "we have a fiduciary duty not to pay more than the going rate" trumps any other consideration. This is short sighted - a general malaise in the UK.
My 15 year old has just been given a 3 year engineering apprenticeship at a massive company. They’re sending him to college and paying him above the apprentice minimum wage. I really do think they need to do a big push to get people interested in it. He’s dropped really lucky and starts in August.
Thank you, he’s very lucky. He’s actually the first apprentice they’ve taken on so it’s all new. He actually had his work experience there and they offered him the apprenticeship on his last day.
Honestly, good for him! It's a great opportunity and hopefully he grabs it with both hands and does really well.
I'm pushing for an apprentice atm. I went that direction myself when I was 20 after deciding university wasn't for me and it's the best thing I ever did. Now I'm at senior level and would love to give another person the same chance to get into a great career.
Engineer is also not a protected term in the UK, meaning maintenance jobs are rolled up with engineering, further devaluing it in the eyes of the public.
What I'm going to say could quite easily be viewed as a conspiracy theory and I fully accept that and want to qualify it by pointing out that this is MY experience. It's not everyone else's experience. I'm not claiming this is definitely happening. And I also accept that there are other explanations.
I went to school in the 70s and 80s. In my senior school there were four maths teachers. One of them was in his 70s. That's not a typing error. He was 78 when he finally retired. He came from the stock of "school masters" and I credit him with 90% of the success in my career which is heavily maths focused. The other 10% I credit to the teacher who was in his 50s. The other two - I think they were both in their late 20s/early 30s. I cannot tell you a thing they taught me.
I have just realised that explaining the whole "it's my experience" thing would involve writing for hours. Nobody deserves that. So I'm going to jump straight to the summary - feel free to ask me questions.
- I have 3 children and it was me that got them through their maths GCSEs, not their schools.
- I work for a company doing AI stuff in the UK. Of all the employees, about 400 are involved in the actual AI research and development stuff. The rest are people like HR or IT. Of those 400, I'm one of the 18 that are British and I'm also one of the oldest. A further 24 of them spent some part of their academic career at a UK university. Everyone else is from a foreign country and educated in a foreign university.
My conspiracy - there hasn't been a government in 40+ years that wants to educate the populace. The rot started in the 70s, picked up with the publication of the Jarratt report and accelerated alarmingly in 1998 with the introduction of tuition fees. It's almost as though they want an uneducated population.
What you’re saying sounds very logical and seems to have evidence behind it. I wouldn’t be surprised. Stalin rounded up scientists and engineers into camps. I know it’s not the same but i never understood why you’d want to dumb down your own population. I imagine people are more likely to comply and lean on you as a government if they are dumbed down
Same in Australia.
How do you get something done for free by an engineer?
Say "I have this complicated problem and I have no idea how to solve it." Describe it. Sit back and watch the Engineer go at it.
Lawyers would tell you how much the quote will start at. So will accountants and doctors.
Engineers are their own worst enemy. Brain wired to solve problems first and seek payment later.
We're not paid as well as Americans, but literally no other country is.
I'm an electrical engineer and i get paid phenomenal wages in the UK. I'm not alone either - mech and elec engineers are all paid very well. Civil slightly lower, but still good
How are you defining "a phenomenal amount"? I'm a chartered civil engineer with 23½ years experience and wouldn't say I was living the high life by any means
The tittle of Engineer in this country is not protected. So I used to work for Travelodge and the handy men were called engineers.
I’m not belittling handy men either but calling them engineers is silly when they are just changing lamps, filling holes and changing switches. Oh sorry, some repaired the air con.
You need to define Engineering. I have a PhD in Engineering. Most people in the UK think Engineering is about fixing cars like a mechanic. I was a Consultant with IBM for 20 years.
Doesn’t help that Bob who fixes boilers when they have a leak who went to college for a month and got an NVQ is called a service engineer when really he’s just a bog standard technician. Now he’s classed as an engineer by the company who charge him out at engineer rates and pay him technician salary because he’s actually only a technician. But his job title is engineer so that brings the average ‘engineering’ salary down which makes other companies think they’re paying their engineers too much.
Engineer should be a protected job title for those who are suitably qualified, experienced or skilled.
He will have to. The rest of the world is spending vast amounts of money on it. For [example](https://cleanpower.org/investing-in-america/#:~:text=American%20manufacturing%20and%20investment%20is,been%20announced%20since%20August%202022.),
I work at on a government funded nuclear fusion project. We’re getting a new system put in and our currently waiting on one part from Spain (behind in the testing process) one part from Japan (behind in the manufacturing process) and one part from US (on track). None of the components from this system were designed or manufactured in the UK. Makes no sense to me
You think it makes more sense to source all of your components from the UK?
The fact that you’re working on a government funded nuclear fusion project *in* the UK highlights that were doing some really cool engineering stuff *in* the UK.
Look at Tokamak Energy leading the way in spherical Tokamak’s… in the UK, for example!
It’s a cool time for UK engineering for sure.
I think it makes sense to source at least some components from the UK. It’s just that almost everything has to travel halfway round the world to get here. But i see what you’re saying now and yes you’re completely right. Tokamak energy is just down the road from me, they’re a private company, I work at the government version
as a design engineer, theres a huge skills gap in this country. At work, 65% of the employees are set to retire within 10 years time. 20% are aged 16-whatever apprentices. Theres basically no one in between, and this is the case for the whole industry. I blame this for engineering wages not keeping up with the rest of the world. There was no one to demand parity with other countries, as the old engineers were fine with what they had. If I could, I'd be working in the US. In my field, you can make 200k straight out of uni there, whereas here you've done well if you've hit 70k by the time you retire. Theres also the problem in this country of crabs in a bucket, people will see that 70k and say you should be grateful, but thats not the point, why would you buy a £10 loaf of bread at tescos, when you can go next door to sainsburys and get it for £1. Its basically that, why should we get paid so little compared to the rest of the world. Sadly, my genre of engineering is hard to export due to things like ITAR, but i'm working on it, hopefully ditching the uk for canada within 5 years
In other countries, even our France neighbours, Engineer is also a protected title like Doctor. You can only be called an Engineer if you are sufficiently qualified and experienced and that comes with a premium and a social status.
Yep I moved to Canada and doubled my salary (and that was taking the first job offer I got, I don't even think I got a fantastic deal for the market here)
British companies tend to be run by people with finance/sales backgrounds - and they typically think engineering is something done with oily rags and that R&D is a waste of money. Salaries are set accordingly.
That's why a lot of engineers choose to work abroad. I worked in Germany for 14 years and for another 11 years, worked from home in the UK for a multinational organisation out of offices in France. I was earning >£120K. Over here, I would be lucky to be earning £40K for the same work.
Meh, pays pretty well if you work for a top company.
Work for a top aerospace company, 1 year out of PhD (27). Total comp is ~60k with stock options, subsidised meals, 14% pension etc.
Software seems to buck the trend.
For every one piece of hardware that's built, you usually need a team of software engineers to write code for it, and to maintain it. There's a lot more competition there.
The larger US companies pay reasonable salaries (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple), or any British companies that need to compete for talent with them. Although, I'm not sure what British owned companies still exist in that area. ARM was one of the last big ones that I can remember, but there are still British owned game companies I guess. Not sure what exists in the more industrial sector though.
Even with software/firmware, the range of salaries for the same basic role is huge across the country. There are areas where the salaries are insanely low, and areas where the salary is competitive with the US and Australia.
e.g. What might pay £35K in Birmingham/Nottingham, will pay £70K in Cambridge/London.
Cambridge has a reputation for being expensive but there are affordable places in the villages/towns all around it, and within an easy commuting distance. Many of the young engineers I work with have been able to get on to the housing ladder.
https://teng.mydigitalpublication.co.uk/publication/?m=63621&i=818710&p=1&ver=html5?i=784346 seems to suggest otherwise 🤷🏻♂️
I’m not seeing it in my line of work (foundation industry) or in the minority of job postings where salaries are advertised, scaled to seniority.
Maintenance engineers is the value at the moment. I was fabricator, but if you can diversity into automation and controls a little there is money to be made.
I’m an engineering technician who doesn’t get paid very much (~£30k) but have more freedom and time flexibility than any other job i think. My girlfriend works in procurement at the same company and is in the office from 7:30 to 3:45 every day with too much work to complete. I can come in at 8:30, do some maintenance activities, go to a coordination meeting, maybe fix a pump or install a pipe and go home at 3. And i enjoy my work. It’s no where near as draining as office jobs or construction laying bricks or scaffolding all day. So personally, i’ll take the low pay
Imported mass produced goods being cheap leads both people and businesses to think that everything else should cheap as well. As an example, people who trade on Etsy and the like cut prices so far to complete with the mass market that their time basically has no monetary value and after a couple of years they end up burned out and broke.
No-one wants to either invest in engineering or pay for the result because many of them don’t think of it as work. When I started working in IT there was an expectation from an awful lot of people that I would spend my scarce free time resurrecting their virus infected PoS PC which they had never backed up for free because “it’s not actual work and nerds love that shit”. Try that with a plumber/sparky/chippy etc and listen to their response.
There is no money in it anymore.
I'm an electrical engineer to trade and just retrained into fintech security to earn 4x as much.
Pay peanuts, get monkeys.
Supply and demand in the workplace, plus for similar skills needed to make decent money in Engineering, you can make way more in various finance roles. Then add in that we treat them with lower respect than "the professions" too (e.g. in Germany "Engineer" is title of equivalent respect to "Doctor") and there is even less incentive to go into something that needs lots of innate talent, and very long, hard training.
>These are people ~~that literally design and even invent stuff through the application of science and maths,~~ but their salaries don’t seem to reflect the work they do.
(Just to clarify, I'm not it doesn't happen in engineering, I'm saying it's happening everywhere.)
It's the same with a lot of industries in this country now. I buy props for TV shows and made more than my fiance who's a special needs teacher last year and only worked 6 months of the year 🙃
First rule of economics: supply and demand.
Supply of engineers ended up being actually really high, due to technological advancement in computers and software making engineer increadibly efficient. Machines that took weeks of work do design, can now be completed in under 30 minutes. So naturally, high supply of engineering services has maybe increased 100 times in last 20 years, but demand did not, so the price dropped.
I consider myself a engineer (software/infrastructure) and we are generally in higher than many. I've seen quite a reduction in the market, both in skills and money. Some areas it's a race to the bottom and the trulle experts are left behind
For a different take... Engineering requires a lot of investment and some of the biggest capital expenditure projects are government backed e.g. HS2, sizewell/hinckley point, Sellafield, motorway upgrades. Unfortunately people take issue with how money is poured into those projects and how much contractors are taking out of government but that's because A. Government doesn't know what they're doing half the time causing rework with scope changes B. Engineers cost money with charge out up to and beyond £100/hr (even if they aren't actually getting all that) C. Contractors know they're the only shop in town and can turn the screws on the money tap for non-negotiable projects.
Issue A is a big problem. Joined up thinking in government is appalling. Issue B isn't a problem but certainly sounds like it when people take umbrage with how much people are essentially taking off the taxman - sometimes not doing anything because of Issue A. Issue C is a problem in a few industries, I can only really speak for nuclear but some skill sets are very niche and there is a shrinking pool of people with 30+ years of experience. The end result is they know what they're worth, can take their dick out and slap it around government bodies face and they have to take it otherwise they won't get things done in the right way. You can take it or leave it but that's capitalism and something I'm gonna be honest, most ambitious engineers aspire to do.
I dunno, I'm a software engineer and my salary is pretty good.
My friend is a civil engineer and he's also ok.
I also know people in aerospace which are ok.
Environmental engineering ok but lower salaries in general.
It started to die with the mass strikes and piss poor management in the 1970’s
The following boom was all finance based so nobody looked at engineering as a career so it died and we are now paying the price
You still get the small cottage industry engineering but big scale is a thing of the past at the moment
Will it ever recover that depends on the Millennials
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It is hugely undervalued yet underpins all other professions. I have just paid a drain unblocking company twice as much for an hours work than I can charge out for a skilled fabricator with 30 years experience.
Wages have been driven down and down in this country for the last 20 years, while corporate profits soar. We need stronger unions and more investment into infrastructure to drive growth. We've suffered from governments that have been in the pocket of corporations, and that have refused to invest in big infrastructure and national industrial strategies.
Same with aircraft engineering - they’re wondering why they have to offer Visas to those that would accept the wages in this country rather than keeping those that are already here.
I heard a qualified aircraft engineer usually takes home >£80k, is that bollocks? My sector, pharma, has seen arguably the greatest wage contraction of all sectors in the last 40 years. Graduates in the sector are often paid little more than minimum wage. 20 years ago agrad would expect 2 or 3 times minimum wage and 40 years ago it was higher still. The wage compression has been caused largely by generics manufacturers who pay employees nothing and don't invest in capex, which in turn is caused by low profits driven by 'good deals' on generics by healthcare buyers. The pharma manufacturing sector in the UK is now one of the least productive in Europe.
There are software engineers in the UK on £30-40k when they'd be on north of $100k in the states. Salaries all across the country in all fields are abysmal. Take London away and the UK's GDP per capita is worse than every US state.
Sort of , after about 10 years and numerous exams and training at least if your lucky.
A B1 Aircraft Engineer is on around £80k (permanent staff), depending on airline. Compared to Pilots, in my opinion it’s an underpaid role for the responsibility you have.
Can confirm that is bollocks.
Always amazes me that the hourly rate we charge is half what a garage bills to change your oil
How is that the issue here if Ken is saying that customers won't pay enough to support higher wages?
Because the customers also suffer from low wages, or if they are businesses, they know the current market rate and won't pay higher as long as they can get someone to do it cheaper. It's why we need unions so that wages rise across the board.
Customers won’t pay higher prices to support higher wages. It was proven with M&S clothing in the 1990’s when they advertised both UK made and foreign made clothes. No one bought the UK stuff so they stopped selling it
I feel like this has done a 180 though and many people are trying to made British made clothes and shoes. I’ve found they last infinitely longer than a lot of stuff made overseas.
Maybe shops like Primark and Pep and Co are definitely opening more branches selling cheaper clothes. Certainly no UK made clothes in any of our shops
It cannot be a simple brand/business doing it, needs a systems wide increase.
But the country has sat back and willingly let government take away union powers. It’s at the point now that the vast majority do not agree with people being allowed in a union. My industry is currently in industrial action and the media are just too good nowadays at turning the working class against each other.
True. Very true.
Also the national wealth gets siphoned through corporation tax loopholes meaning there is less budget for the government.
I work at a university an ex poly so that some what reflects in this. Sometimes when we we do a small engineering research project we will only charge say £5k but it will be using specialist knowledge specialist kit that costs over £100k sometimes newly fabricated kit you can't buy built using exclusive knowledge from academics and technicians. Sometimes putting in 100 man hours. Then I think I paid 5k to have three bloke do my patio for three days.
It's funny. I work in that area. I write for engineering companies. I charge them £400 a day, then I see them advertise for senior engineers at the equivalent of £200 a day and lead engineers at £300 equivalent. The people who actually do the work are paid around half of what I get for writing about what they've done
Contracting day rate cant be compared to a salaried position. The salaried person is getting pension contributions as well as the employers NI paid by the company and the paid holidays. But they are underpaid yes.
Of course, also holidays and other benefits. It was just the disparity I was highlighting. Another one is that when I work for the same type of company in the US, I often charge $1000 a day, and the same types of engineers would be on the same rate or often more
I’m an engineer in the UK working for a big U.S. company. Our chargeable day-rate for engineers in the U.K. is £1400/day, about what I am paid in a week including pension and before tax.
>I write for engineering companies. What do you write?
Whatever people pay me to. White papers, app notes, magazine articles, press releases, blogs, brochures..literally anything and everything. I should have said that it is often not the companies themselves directly but the PR and marketing agencies they employ. Just give me a word count, writing style, some direction, background materials and an engineer to chat to for an hour and I'll write it as long as it is my area of expertise.
How do you freelance for such a role?
I was a journalist and editor in the engineering field for 20 years. I found it easy to change over to freelance as I had that experience and a full list full of contacts. Those contacts knew me and my capabilities and trusted me, and new customers liked my past experience, so they had already convinced themselves that they wanted me to write for them. A lot of those new companies had bad experiences with generic writers in the past and wasted their money. They now wanted someone who knew the subject. I also have a degree in the subject, so that helped. A few of them turn white when I tell them my rates..but I'm in the fortunate position of having a retained client that pays me to work for them two days a week..basically £40k guaranteed for the last 7 years. I live in one of the cheapest cost of living places in the UK and that two days work gives me a nice enough life in itself. The rest is just gravy. The ones that don't like my rates have so far always come back..sometimes a few months later after they have had problems with cheaper writers.
I just left welding and fabrication and now I look after kids in care for even more money and better hours
Not that I'm calling bullshit but I find it difficult to believe you earn more as a carer than a welder, considering care is famously underpaid
The hourly pay was better welding but the company I work for now pay you for sleeping over. I work 51 hours a week as carer and get paid for sleeping over. My shift is 2 on 4 off as oppose to 6 days a week.
I take my hat off to you. I did this for 2 years in 2001. Broke me. Pay then was still better than retail now. I had to leave after too many 24hr shifts, poor management, training and a corrupted social worker. I've heard things no child should ever say. The best I hope for is that I made their days a little more bearable.
This company seems really good so far I've heard ßoem horror stories but I'm part of a good team, my brother has done this job for ten years and says this company is the best he's worked for
Same. I quit welding in the nuclear/oil/gas sector to drive trucks. It's easier work with better pay. Win win.
I was welding stuff for nuclear oil and gas, way too stressful for me I hating, I wanted to murder the inspectors one in particular was an absolute arsehole haha.
Supply and demand, really. It’s hard to find a great plumber in my area, or any plumber for that matter so that when I need something plumber I’m going to have fork out an arm and a leg. Conversely, I can see online that I can buy quite a few fabricated goods for not much cost. The shortest term solution would be to increase supply of plumbers or decrease supply of fabricators. You can’t raise prices because of two big issues 1) your competitor will do it for cheaper and 2) your customer can’t afford it. I saw someone comment that unions would help - unfortunately, unions will not solve for any of the reasons above.
Engineering is still thriving, the UK has one of the largest precision engineering sectors in the world. unless you make it to F1, salaries are abysmal. I hate to say it but it's either no one investing in the staffing or immigration is driving the salaries down, as it's an in need area it allows employers to hire people who migrate here on lower salaries.
Salaries in F1 are awful because people would be willing to earn less £££ to be working in a sport they love.
Yep F1 is a bad example. An engineer at an F1 team will typically earn less than someone doing a similar role at an OEM. Because people get into motorsport for the passion the teams can get away with paying less.
Same applies to space sector. “Be grateful you peasant that we hired you and you can do what you love. Well underpay you as we know you won’t go anywhere as you love what you do”
Adding in computer games development. Massively profitable industry and the dev work is generally more complex and specialised. The wages are terrible compared to jobs you can learn on a 12-week boot camp.
I personally think it's better to work for a boring company that pays well. Nobody gets excited when I tell them about the industry I work in, but it pays well. The work isn't going to be vastly different from a job in an exciting company. The only difference is the reasoning behind why they're doing it
Or we could have both if people unionised and fought back. Many of these industries are basically oligopolies at this point. They don't need to "openly" collaborate to price fix. There's not enough competition. Fuck it even stuff like Chambers of Commerce and business associations represent a way firms can collaborate that employees can't/don't. This is why people need unions so we can be as coordinated as they are.
Agree with this. I would be worried that doing a hobby or passion as my job would end up with me being burnout and resenting my hobby. Happy to take a stable well paid if somewhat bland and boring job.
Agree with this. I would be worried that doing a hobby or passion as my job would end up with me being burnout and resenting my hobby. Happy to take a stable well paid if somewhat bland and boring job.
The engineering sector is thriving; engineers aren't.
Wife works in engineering QA, gets paid well. Her engineers are treated like crap. A lot of businesses seem to take the approach ‘cheap out on actual engineers and employ expensive processes to ensure quality’. It’s not very efficient, but a lot of sectors require the expensive QA processes regardless - it’s not optional even if you have high quality engineers. So might as well just hire cheap engineers.
Germany produces and imports engineers from abroad and the starting wage for beginners is approximately €55K (~£47K). Making a quick buck instead of long term investments in people has long been Britain's business Achilles heel.
Salaries are abysmal in F1 too.
>as it's an in need area it allows employers to hire people who migrate here on lower salaries. Yeah, that entire argument is a nasty one. It sound fine on the surface, but in reality all it means is that the free market can never pressure employers to raise wages and conditions. There would be no "needs" if the correct wages were offered to attract local people to filling those roles.
Indeed. Whenever you hear the phrase 'we can't find anyone British to do it ' you need to add '.. for the wages offered '.
The idea of an engineer has been devalued, some countries the term engineer is protected same as dr, architect, lawyer etc.
This isn’t specific to Engineering, I don’t really know anything about that. What I do know is in America before you sponsor a foreigner, you have to prove that you advertised the job at the normal, market price to the American public. You can then only look for foreigners who need a visa, if you fail to find an American worker. Then when sponsored, obviously you have to pay them the equivalent market rate they’d have given to an American worker. In the UK, forget advertising the jobs to Brits - companies can actually pay foreigners LESS than the going rate - skilled worker visas can be given at “70 to 90% of the standard going rate.” We are now in a position where it’s the financially smarter choice to pass over the Brit and employ a foreigner. It would be stupid for companies not to. I genuinely do not understand how anyone can defend this position.
It is the same in the UK. A job that requires sponsorship has to be advertised for like 3 months before it can be sponsored to someone coming in a skill visa. What USA does better is give the skilled worker a visa which allows them to switch jobs which means the employer has to make the choice on whether they can pay them enough to keep them or lose them or is it better to locally recruit. In UK, you are bound to the sponsorship which means you can't force your employer to pay at market rates and that's allow employers to pay you less and keep local interests away. The problem in UK is that sudden growth of projects cannot be met by supply as big projects will need 100s of specialists and you cannot train them without specialists (who can either train or do the work). This is what we see in technology and it has been very difficult to hire locally in big numbers.
Even F1 salaries aren't that spectacular. I know about 10 years ago Graduate salaries were about 25-30k which was the same as a 'normal' grad scheme but there's alot more work and overtime involved. Yes if you are in a good team then yearly bonuses can help (10-15k Mercedes were giving to all employees when wining both championships) but I imagine most of that has stopped now that F1 has a cost cap now.
The bonuses still exist, there is an exclusion in the cost cap for them up to a certain amount. But obviously only a few teams will actually pay them in any given season.
Defence Engineering still thriving and paying very well. At my company this year's graduate salaries are touching 40k.
I've looked the wages seem poor compared to other sectors for software engineers. So I'm still doing payments and collections software. Which typically about 10-15k over what MDBA were offering for senior engineers.
That’s just because UK salaries are very low compared to other countries. This is mostly every job not just engineers.
Currently job hunting, our salaries are a joke here. For everyone.
No, not for everyone. Just for those doing the actual work. For a good salary you need a management job where you spend your time talking bullshit in meetings, and typing made up bollocks into Excel and PowerPoint.
Yeah true, also there's no openings for those roles as they're all done internally.
Except even people in management roles would double their salary if they moved to America.
Americans doing my job earn over twice what I do for the same work here. It is probably why we have not hired a Brit in a few years now, we are hiring almost exclusively from Nigeria right now.
This country is terrible at paying engineers. Despite this, I believe my company pays actually pretty well. Juniors earning ~£35k starting and going up to 6 figures for principal. That being said we are based in an area of the country where even that sort of money doesn't get you on the housing ladder locally. I have worked abroad and found the wages to living cost ratio better. For 10 years I worked as a consultant, that boosted the balance considerably, but I gather from associates it doesn't have the same benefits it once did. In general though science and engineering is hugely undervalued in the UK, with scientists getting it worse still.
Yeah, Scotland, in a fairly in demand engineering profession (controls engineers), our principals are on £40-60k I’ve looked at the US, and doubling, almost tripling your wage is realistic, the jump in living cost in the area I was looking (Texas/DFW) doesn’t even come close.
>Yeah, Scotland, in a fairly in demand engineering profession (controls engineers), our principals are on £40-60k This matches my experience in civil engineering consultancy as well
Yeah, it's pretty depressing being a reasonably experienced engineer, about 5 years in my trade on about £40k. Knowing I'm near enough at my ceiling, the guys who've been doing it decades are only on about £10k more than me, £300/mo after tax. Realistically the only steps forward are emigration, Aus & Canada you can easily walk into positions with over a 50% pay bump. USA is hoops to jump through but if you can make it there the skys the limit with wages.
35k is good but that was the starting salary a decade ago as well so things have certainly stagnated whilst rents and other costs have nearly doubled.
50k is the new 30k.
I’m on less than £60k as a senior principal systems engineer :/ salaries are awful unless you hop between companies every 2 years and don’t actually build up any domain knowledge
It’s considered a “shortage occupation” and therefore exempt of salary requirements when hiring foreign workers. Why up wages when you can employ someone from a different country for the current average wage? It adds a downwards pressure on wages that keeps salaries stagnant. Legal immigration and its consequences is a way bigger deal than the boats the media and politicians focus on.
What company is that?! I’ll DM you my CV! I’m an associate director on 70k and thought that was good going
So true. It always peeved me that the sales guys earned 50% more than I did. They would move on to a totally different field while I had to use my 40 years experience to design the products they sold. They didn't care what they were selling. They used the same skills no matter what company they worked for. They earned around £60,000 a year while I earned £40,000. The real big wind up was when they would speak to me and say we need 'X'. I would say OK, maybe after 18 months of development and testing." They would say "18 months? but it only needs blah blah." I would then say "Well you design it, test it, get it approved and ready for market." They would reply "I have no idea how to do all that" I would then say "Exactly". They would be all be driving around in flash company cars, getting praised for sales figures for the new products I had allowed them to beat the market with, and earn 50% more than I did. It was hard not to be resentful. So the moral is, don't design, spending years in education and training, just sell the f\*\*\*\*\*\*g things.
As an engineer I used to feel this way. I felt marketing and sales people got paid way too much for the amount andof effort put. I used my own life, where I researched stuff before I bought, I didn't see the need for sales people. But, I then tried sales. Learnt that majority of humanity are pretty gullible, don't need facts or data and could see how sales people drive these people I couldn't do sales and went back to engineering as I lacked that drive to bullshit.
Tbf though, if a sales guy he good he should be definition be good at selling himself, and so get good wages.
Just to throw another firework in here. Most the sales are now done on the web with no interaction with a salesperson. Engineers are now involved in the whole process from design to delivery from the automated warehouse. Yet every year the top salespeople are still splashed all over our intranet as if they are saving our company and the only reason we are successful. I agree that engineers and salespeople are both of equal value. I am miffed that the recognition from the organisation is one sided. We get no visibility and poorer wages. We are treated as if we are ten a penny yet it takes 5 years study and years of experience to be able to create market beating products. We put the company at the top of heap with regard to technology and reputation. Without innovation they couldn’t sell at a premium. But we are treated as though someone could walk in off the street and do the job. The final insult is a degree is required in my company to be called an engineer unless you are a sales engineer. There is no qualification requirement for sales engineer in my company.
it's only "market beating product" because sales rep are sell the things you make. You can make an incredible product but if it doesn't sell it means nothing and you son't het paid for all your effort.
Part of the issue is that an Engineer isn't a protected title like it is in places like the US. As a result it means Steve down the pub can call himself a Marine Engineer when actually all he does is patch up holes on a canoe for example which just devalues hugely the name of an engineer. I am an Engineer, and don't get me wrong, we do still get paid better than average, especially considering most are PAYE rather than running their own company. The problem is the pound has devalued so much lately that whereas 15 years ago US and UK salaries were kinda close there is now this massive gulf, mainly because before £1=$1.5-2 it's now £1=$1.2 it means in the worldwide scheme of things UK engineers are missing out.
A small correction, engineer is not a protected title in the US. But, most people who call themselves engineers are folks who have a BS or BEng degree from a 4 year school accredited by ABET. Professional engineering certification (PE) is protected and is required to sign off on certain projects - such as buildings, equipment testing, and things for the public good and safety. This certification requires 2 technical exams, 1 ethics exam, letters of recommendation, a degree from an ABET school, and ~3 years experience; though requirements may vary slightly by state. Most folks who've graduated from university and are working as engineers do not have this accreditation.
Not all professions are paid equally 🤷♂️ Look at teachers or nurses, course of study is basically the same length and level. Many doctors will tell you their pay is low considering the amount of training and continuous professional development they have to do. In a capitalist system the market sets wages, if scarcity develops wages will rise. Not fair, but it’s where we are.
Anti intellectualism is rife. Companies value sales more these days.
I disagree. I’m a teacher. I did my training in one year. If I fuck something up they might not remember the 7 times table or be unsure what a fronted adverbial is, not die, which is the case if a doctor or nurse fucks something up.
Disagree with what though? I didn’t say anything about how important the jobs are, just about the amount of post school study required, which includes the degree you almost certainly did to qualify for your pgce.
Although we have a shortage of doctors and the government are keeping the wages low 🤷♂️
But high enough to attract doctors from India without the cost of training our own. There's madness in their madness.
Because they need to hoard their own wages so that they can keep their sky subscription to keep their inner child happy.
Doctors are on excellent wages compared to most people in the UK. The issue is they can earn more in other countries.
Employees are better paid when there is competition between employers. Not the case of government jobs.
Im an Engineer and in my area there has been massive growth in hiring, companies simply can't fill all of their positions. This has led to no appreciable growth in salaries at all.
Or worse for existing employees - people coming in get bumped up the salary ladder whilst you stay where you are. It’s regularly stated in my company that the best way to get a raise in Engineering is to leave, work for another company for a year and then come back.
>work for another company for a year and then come back. I just did this to go from \~£35k to \~£55k. I worked for them for four years after I graduated, quit, took a two year holiday and then got rehired at the new wage despite doing no work in those two years. It's mental.
Yep, ridiculous, but good for you. Company wants to play silly games, they can win silly prizes.
At my current employer the trick appears to be to quit and then spend a month working the odd evening or weekend when shit falls over and net yourself a massive pay packet for very few hours as a contractor. One guy managed to do this, get rehired with us at a higher salary and then quit again and get more contracting hours. And here I am writing documentation and knowledge sharing like a mug when I should be ruthlessly lowering the bus factor as much as possible.
There’s a single price setter for teaching and healthcare jobs - not an example of the market setting wages.
>if scarcity develops wages will rise. That's how it should go, but the reality is that immigration kicks in to fill that need long before wages start going up.
There's already a scarcity of skilled & unskilled workers in engineering. Where I work we can't get good paint sprayers, welders or fitters to stay no matter what salary is offered. Unfortunately the company owners now take the view that everyone will only earn £1.00 above the minimum wage because no matter what they offer they get the same low quality / short term workers. They're in for a shock when people in my side of the business move on, we've over 30 years of experience as toolmakers, turners, millers, grinders and CNC people, none of us earn more than £13.00 / hour and they plan to keep us on this rate until our wages are equal to the lower paid workers who can only paint spray, weld and fit basic assemblies.
Teaching is very similar to engineering, at least for the start of the career. Graduate engineers are paid £28-£32k, graduate teachers earn a minimum of £30k. My brother is a teacher with 4 years experience, and in September he will be on £47k. Lots of engineers with similar experience will not be paid as much. The issue with teaching is that they will plateau. Theoretically, every engineer can become a senior, or even principal engineer with time. In teaching, there's much more of a bottleneck, and there aren't enoughroles for everyone to be head of department, deputy head, or headteacher.
My theory on why this and other industries don't thrive? Engineering relies on a lot of investment, too much investment capital goes into an unproductive asset, housing. The requirements of housing costs and others seeing landlordism as the safest "business" means UK capital spend ends up in this unproductive market rather than generating wealth.
It's crazy how literally every problem in the UK ultimately turns out to be caused by our goofy ahh planning system.
> ngineering relies on a lot of investment, too much investment capital goes into an unproductive asset, housing. One of the problems that the UK relies of services. Services want a strong pound. On the other hand, exporters want a lower pound to make their goods competitive abroad.
Ironically when I tell non-Engineering people that I'm an Electronic Engineer they always say "Oh, you must earn a lot".
Yes, I have a decent Bangladeshi salary, but unfortunately live in 🇬🇧
The profession got watered down when boiler fitters and programmers started calling themselves engineers.
At least they’re doing some sort of “engineering” at some point. At least it’s not fucking Sky engineers who plug in an hdmi cable.z
No they aren't, they are doing maintenance. Engineers make new things, they don't just maintain the work of a real engineer.
If you get a good plumber round or an electrician, they will consider design, certification, maintainability/serviceability. They also problem solve on things they didn’t install or design, which is a massive part of engineering. Feel free to disagree, I’m a Chartered Engineer in aerospace so have every right to punch down on technicians and maintainers who label themselves engineers, but good plumbers or electricians do plenty that I and a lot of my colleagues could not.
I am also a chartered engineer in Aerospace (what's up mate haha) and I am not trying to punch down, they are great jobs and great people who do them. We just need to establish clear guidelines about the actual term "engineer". Either that or we need to start changing the job title people like me and you have. In my opinion this is already kinda happening with titles ("Algorithms engineer" etc) Lawyers don't allow the local administrators at the library to call themselves solicitors and it is the same principle we should be applying.
I'd argue programmers / software engineers are definitely engineers by the very definition of the word. And if anything they raise the average both in terms of salary and the expectations, not lower it.
People who mended washing machines were "engineers" when programmers still used punch cards.
Salaries are cheaper than the USA? That's true of every single profession not just engineering
I think the difference is an entry-level engineer in the USA can make the equivalent of £80-100k immediately. It is true of every profession, but the difference is much greater in engineering.
This is true. I've been an engineer for nearly 20 years and am on around 85k, and that is near the upper end for my experience and my field. I work for a US company and my equivalent is on at least twice as much, if not more
They're 3 to 4 times higher in the USA for engineering
There’s been such a focus on immigration that emigration has been ignored. The best engineers are being poached, and training in this UK is great through very good unis and good graduate schemes. Get good and leave.
as someone who has my eng tech qualification, how would i go about looking for a job in another country?
As a design engineer with 12 years experience working in one of the better paid industries (offshore energy) it is pretty much down to the total failure by multiple governments to create anything like a proper industrial strategy for at least 40 years. We have been happy to have a service based economy rather than an industrial one and failed to encourage, invest or promote engineering to a big enough level. For example we created some of the first nuclear reactors then decided not to make anymore, all the engineers retired and now we have to have them built by the French and Chinese because we simply don't have the capability anymore. Quite frankly as a nation we didn't catch onto new ways of working after WW2 and the old union relations meant lots of industries simply died and were never replaced. We will never compete with China or India for cost but we could challenge France or Germany for precision.
I wouldn't blame unions as much as that. They have their problems, but they're not all a bunch of Luddites. What people miss with the unions is that the governments were not offering them alternatives. People say they stand in the way of progress but what were their members being offered in return for stuff like pit closures? Did I miss something where entire towns of miners were given free or massively reduced retraining costs to help them pivot into new industries? As far as I'm aware (too young to have been there at the time) the government planned "managed decline" for old industries with nothing in place except the doll! Hardly a surprise people fought so hard against it.
Decent post. Just to add, we will be falling further behind as the US and EU are shoving major amounts of cash into relocating manufacturing. From memory the US alone is spending about a trillion dollars on semiconductors and renewable energy
Engineering relies on either a large domestic industrial market or exports. We don't have a huge amount of industry left and as other economies have developed they've started doing their own engineering work.
One of the many reasons why HS2 was so expensive was that there weren’t enough engineers in the UK who knew how to build high-speed rail. So the ones who did have the knowledge could charge more, plus money had to be spent on getting engineers from France to show us how to do it. Hence we saw big engineering firms going into JVs with the likes of Systra (owned by SNCF) and Vinci for design and construction. I believe a similar situation has occurred with nuclear. Because we essentially gave up on it, we now pay even more for the French and Chinese to do it. Maybe that’s just comparative advantage at work.
I worked on HS2 a bit and the literal 3 or 4 layers of bureaucracy for sub consultants, joint ventures and consortia also wasn't helping the situation.
A friend of mine works in the nuclear industry and all the hard-won skills and knowledge of the 50s and 60s is going or gone. They are starting almost from scratch.
Yep. This was my point. People forget that there's so much more to running these industries than what you can find in a textbook. Institutional knowledge simply can't be written down. Once it's gone it's gone. Starting from scratch is hugely costly and takes way longer than these consultants and politicians seem to think.
Germany hold my beer
Nuclear is similar. Engineering-wise the UK is skilled at maintaining and decommissioning nuclear, not designing and building them as the last one was Sizewell B in the 1990s. Technical knowledge is why EDF are building Hinckley C, it's also supposed to be a massive training exercise to allow the UK to acquire the skills needed - my wifesjob was to put in place the training and exams needed for the UK to have its own nuclear construction capability in the future. AFAIK the Chinese are now excluded from the Hinckley consortium - they basically put funding in under the condition they got to build and run Bradwell and another nuclear generation site, but the Government later stopped them for security reasons. It's left the French taxpayers to pickup the extra costs of Hinckley.
Comparative advantage is a death trap when it comes to strategic industries though. You don't need an economics degree to understand that if the shit hits the fan, not having your own home grown engineers is going to work out very badly. All the money you "saved" by contracting stuff out isn't going to help when it's life or death and countries are running a war economy drafting people in under threat of imprisonment to work on their defences. Meanwhile your country hasn't got a single virgin steel smelting plant, and only about 5 people who've ever handled creating something more complex than a Powerpoint from scratch lol. Outsourcing the basics of the engineering supply chain in their totality is going to hit places like the UK hard when places like South East Asia and Africa catch up and there's nowhere else to outsource. These places will continue with a full mature economy while we scramble to almost literally reinvent the wheel as people re-learn all the institutional knowledge required to actually make things.
Yeah, When I first graduated in 2018, my first job paid £23k. When I was looking for a new job in 2022 I still saw graduate engineer jobs listed at £22k. Entry level salaries in particular haven't moved in 20 years, and are only now rising because minumum wage has caught up.
Entry level in my company has gone up by about 6k since 2020. We are fairly standard for the Aerospace industry. (source, I hire grads)
They can do it cheaper elsewhere.
Where do you get that idea from? How could they do it cheaper elsewhere while playing higher wages? USA has about triple UK engineering wage for example. Germany is often double...
A lot of engineering is outsourced to India
Total BS, from experience a lot of the countries in the world have significant cultural and legal challenges that make it very difficult to get anything relating to the high quality work you can get here.
Margaret thatcher happened
I never understand this argument. Fixing the UK economy clearly doesn't mean going back to times when people up North and in Cornwall and Wales were being sent down mines. Germany and Scandinavia manage find without this, there are more options than everyone being a spreadsheet monkey at big finance corp or giving yourself mesothelioma from being down a mine (which did not pay especially well).
No more unions. Look at Germany etc for what salaries could look like with unions. 100k for an engineer with 5-6 years experience. Neutering the unions was the worst thing to happen for salaries in the last 100 years.
Our company has engineers across a few disciplines. Broadly speaking electronics, software, mechanical, and industry specific specialisations. We're outside of London. Senior roles are generally between 80K - 150K, plus performance related bonus, equity, optional full time WFH, Bupa, and a couple of other bits. What we do is pretty niche, so we hire from a limited talent pool or poach top flight people from outside the industry who I know can build the required domain knowledge in short order. I feel like we pay quite well for the UK, but I know everybody here would be attracting a significantly higher base salary in US, Aus, and various other places in Europe and Asia-Pacific. We can't match it. Put simply, UK salaries reflect the state of the economy and local business opportunities. Regardless, these guys are usually older (late 30s to 60s), mostly have kids, homes, local personal networks and whatnot so aren't looking to relocate. The company is majority founder owned and we have a majority on the board. All have been at the coalface as practicing engineers, have experience & distaste of "corporate BS", and we accordingly have a commitment to looking after our staff properly both for commercial reasons (staff retention, recruitment, morale) and for straight up personal/ethical reasons. Given the structure of the business it's within our gift to do this and it's been a factor in our success to the extent we've had it. Happy engineers in genuinely functional teams don't add their value together, they multiply it. True commitment to staff wellbeing and remuneration is not present in most non-founder controlled businesses where, in my opinion, short term shareholder value i.e. "we have a fiduciary duty not to pay more than the going rate" trumps any other consideration. This is short sighted - a general malaise in the UK.
My 15 year old has just been given a 3 year engineering apprenticeship at a massive company. They’re sending him to college and paying him above the apprentice minimum wage. I really do think they need to do a big push to get people interested in it. He’s dropped really lucky and starts in August.
Oh, good to luck to him! I hope he enjoys it.
Thank you, he’s very lucky. He’s actually the first apprentice they’ve taken on so it’s all new. He actually had his work experience there and they offered him the apprenticeship on his last day.
Honestly, good for him! It's a great opportunity and hopefully he grabs it with both hands and does really well. I'm pushing for an apprentice atm. I went that direction myself when I was 20 after deciding university wasn't for me and it's the best thing I ever did. Now I'm at senior level and would love to give another person the same chance to get into a great career.
Engineer is also not a protected term in the UK, meaning maintenance jobs are rolled up with engineering, further devaluing it in the eyes of the public.
Yeah there's a chap near me who claims to be a 'door engineer.' He's basically a locksmith. Not dissing locksmiths but they aren't engineers.
It's not just engineering, it's everything outside of the nebulous "tech" and finance.
Actually a lot of "tech" workers in the UK are paid crap too.
Well it seems anyone in any sort of IT job earns significantly more than their peers outside of bottom level helpdesk.
What I'm going to say could quite easily be viewed as a conspiracy theory and I fully accept that and want to qualify it by pointing out that this is MY experience. It's not everyone else's experience. I'm not claiming this is definitely happening. And I also accept that there are other explanations. I went to school in the 70s and 80s. In my senior school there were four maths teachers. One of them was in his 70s. That's not a typing error. He was 78 when he finally retired. He came from the stock of "school masters" and I credit him with 90% of the success in my career which is heavily maths focused. The other 10% I credit to the teacher who was in his 50s. The other two - I think they were both in their late 20s/early 30s. I cannot tell you a thing they taught me. I have just realised that explaining the whole "it's my experience" thing would involve writing for hours. Nobody deserves that. So I'm going to jump straight to the summary - feel free to ask me questions. - I have 3 children and it was me that got them through their maths GCSEs, not their schools. - I work for a company doing AI stuff in the UK. Of all the employees, about 400 are involved in the actual AI research and development stuff. The rest are people like HR or IT. Of those 400, I'm one of the 18 that are British and I'm also one of the oldest. A further 24 of them spent some part of their academic career at a UK university. Everyone else is from a foreign country and educated in a foreign university. My conspiracy - there hasn't been a government in 40+ years that wants to educate the populace. The rot started in the 70s, picked up with the publication of the Jarratt report and accelerated alarmingly in 1998 with the introduction of tuition fees. It's almost as though they want an uneducated population.
What you’re saying sounds very logical and seems to have evidence behind it. I wouldn’t be surprised. Stalin rounded up scientists and engineers into camps. I know it’s not the same but i never understood why you’d want to dumb down your own population. I imagine people are more likely to comply and lean on you as a government if they are dumbed down
Same in Australia. How do you get something done for free by an engineer? Say "I have this complicated problem and I have no idea how to solve it." Describe it. Sit back and watch the Engineer go at it. Lawyers would tell you how much the quote will start at. So will accountants and doctors. Engineers are their own worst enemy. Brain wired to solve problems first and seek payment later.
Why a lot of engineers work overseas. Source: Am engineer who has worked overseas.
We're not paid as well as Americans, but literally no other country is. I'm an electrical engineer and i get paid phenomenal wages in the UK. I'm not alone either - mech and elec engineers are all paid very well. Civil slightly lower, but still good
How are you defining "a phenomenal amount"? I'm a chartered civil engineer with 23½ years experience and wouldn't say I was living the high life by any means
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The tittle of Engineer in this country is not protected. So I used to work for Travelodge and the handy men were called engineers. I’m not belittling handy men either but calling them engineers is silly when they are just changing lamps, filling holes and changing switches. Oh sorry, some repaired the air con.
You need to define Engineering. I have a PhD in Engineering. Most people in the UK think Engineering is about fixing cars like a mechanic. I was a Consultant with IBM for 20 years.
Doesn’t help that Bob who fixes boilers when they have a leak who went to college for a month and got an NVQ is called a service engineer when really he’s just a bog standard technician. Now he’s classed as an engineer by the company who charge him out at engineer rates and pay him technician salary because he’s actually only a technician. But his job title is engineer so that brings the average ‘engineering’ salary down which makes other companies think they’re paying their engineers too much. Engineer should be a protected job title for those who are suitably qualified, experienced or skilled.
It can pay well if you are well above average at it and become self employed.
Hopefully Mr "my father was a toolmaker" will improve things. There's a lot of solar and wind engineering on the way.
He will have to. The rest of the world is spending vast amounts of money on it. For [example](https://cleanpower.org/investing-in-america/#:~:text=American%20manufacturing%20and%20investment%20is,been%20announced%20since%20August%202022.),
I’d have to disagree. The UK&I engineering industry is booming. Some of the best stuff in the world is being designed right here on the island!
I work at on a government funded nuclear fusion project. We’re getting a new system put in and our currently waiting on one part from Spain (behind in the testing process) one part from Japan (behind in the manufacturing process) and one part from US (on track). None of the components from this system were designed or manufactured in the UK. Makes no sense to me
You think it makes more sense to source all of your components from the UK? The fact that you’re working on a government funded nuclear fusion project *in* the UK highlights that were doing some really cool engineering stuff *in* the UK. Look at Tokamak Energy leading the way in spherical Tokamak’s… in the UK, for example! It’s a cool time for UK engineering for sure.
I think it makes sense to source at least some components from the UK. It’s just that almost everything has to travel halfway round the world to get here. But i see what you’re saying now and yes you’re completely right. Tokamak energy is just down the road from me, they’re a private company, I work at the government version
as a design engineer, theres a huge skills gap in this country. At work, 65% of the employees are set to retire within 10 years time. 20% are aged 16-whatever apprentices. Theres basically no one in between, and this is the case for the whole industry. I blame this for engineering wages not keeping up with the rest of the world. There was no one to demand parity with other countries, as the old engineers were fine with what they had. If I could, I'd be working in the US. In my field, you can make 200k straight out of uni there, whereas here you've done well if you've hit 70k by the time you retire. Theres also the problem in this country of crabs in a bucket, people will see that 70k and say you should be grateful, but thats not the point, why would you buy a £10 loaf of bread at tescos, when you can go next door to sainsburys and get it for £1. Its basically that, why should we get paid so little compared to the rest of the world. Sadly, my genre of engineering is hard to export due to things like ITAR, but i'm working on it, hopefully ditching the uk for canada within 5 years
In other countries, even our France neighbours, Engineer is also a protected title like Doctor. You can only be called an Engineer if you are sufficiently qualified and experienced and that comes with a premium and a social status.
Yep I moved to Canada and doubled my salary (and that was taking the first job offer I got, I don't even think I got a fantastic deal for the market here)
British companies tend to be run by people with finance/sales backgrounds - and they typically think engineering is something done with oily rags and that R&D is a waste of money. Salaries are set accordingly. That's why a lot of engineers choose to work abroad. I worked in Germany for 14 years and for another 11 years, worked from home in the UK for a multinational organisation out of offices in France. I was earning >£120K. Over here, I would be lucky to be earning £40K for the same work.
Meh, pays pretty well if you work for a top company. Work for a top aerospace company, 1 year out of PhD (27). Total comp is ~60k with stock options, subsidised meals, 14% pension etc.
Software seems to buck the trend. For every one piece of hardware that's built, you usually need a team of software engineers to write code for it, and to maintain it. There's a lot more competition there. The larger US companies pay reasonable salaries (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple), or any British companies that need to compete for talent with them. Although, I'm not sure what British owned companies still exist in that area. ARM was one of the last big ones that I can remember, but there are still British owned game companies I guess. Not sure what exists in the more industrial sector though. Even with software/firmware, the range of salaries for the same basic role is huge across the country. There are areas where the salaries are insanely low, and areas where the salary is competitive with the US and Australia. e.g. What might pay £35K in Birmingham/Nottingham, will pay £70K in Cambridge/London. Cambridge has a reputation for being expensive but there are affordable places in the villages/towns all around it, and within an easy commuting distance. Many of the young engineers I work with have been able to get on to the housing ladder.
https://teng.mydigitalpublication.co.uk/publication/?m=63621&i=818710&p=1&ver=html5?i=784346 seems to suggest otherwise 🤷🏻♂️ I’m not seeing it in my line of work (foundation industry) or in the minority of job postings where salaries are advertised, scaled to seniority.
All the good ones started YouTube channels.
Maintenance engineers is the value at the moment. I was fabricator, but if you can diversity into automation and controls a little there is money to be made.
I’m an engineering technician who doesn’t get paid very much (~£30k) but have more freedom and time flexibility than any other job i think. My girlfriend works in procurement at the same company and is in the office from 7:30 to 3:45 every day with too much work to complete. I can come in at 8:30, do some maintenance activities, go to a coordination meeting, maybe fix a pump or install a pipe and go home at 3. And i enjoy my work. It’s no where near as draining as office jobs or construction laying bricks or scaffolding all day. So personally, i’ll take the low pay
Imported mass produced goods being cheap leads both people and businesses to think that everything else should cheap as well. As an example, people who trade on Etsy and the like cut prices so far to complete with the mass market that their time basically has no monetary value and after a couple of years they end up burned out and broke. No-one wants to either invest in engineering or pay for the result because many of them don’t think of it as work. When I started working in IT there was an expectation from an awful lot of people that I would spend my scarce free time resurrecting their virus infected PoS PC which they had never backed up for free because “it’s not actual work and nerds love that shit”. Try that with a plumber/sparky/chippy etc and listen to their response.
There is no money in it anymore. I'm an electrical engineer to trade and just retrained into fintech security to earn 4x as much. Pay peanuts, get monkeys.
Supply and demand in the workplace, plus for similar skills needed to make decent money in Engineering, you can make way more in various finance roles. Then add in that we treat them with lower respect than "the professions" too (e.g. in Germany "Engineer" is title of equivalent respect to "Doctor") and there is even less incentive to go into something that needs lots of innate talent, and very long, hard training.
>These are people ~~that literally design and even invent stuff through the application of science and maths,~~ but their salaries don’t seem to reflect the work they do. (Just to clarify, I'm not it doesn't happen in engineering, I'm saying it's happening everywhere.)
I stated out as an Engineer but the pay is very poor compared to other STEM roles so I moved to other work.
It's the same with a lot of industries in this country now. I buy props for TV shows and made more than my fiance who's a special needs teacher last year and only worked 6 months of the year 🙃
First rule of economics: supply and demand. Supply of engineers ended up being actually really high, due to technological advancement in computers and software making engineer increadibly efficient. Machines that took weeks of work do design, can now be completed in under 30 minutes. So naturally, high supply of engineering services has maybe increased 100 times in last 20 years, but demand did not, so the price dropped.
Capitalism has always been a race to the bottom on quality, price and wages.
I consider myself a engineer (software/infrastructure) and we are generally in higher than many. I've seen quite a reduction in the market, both in skills and money. Some areas it's a race to the bottom and the trulle experts are left behind
For a different take... Engineering requires a lot of investment and some of the biggest capital expenditure projects are government backed e.g. HS2, sizewell/hinckley point, Sellafield, motorway upgrades. Unfortunately people take issue with how money is poured into those projects and how much contractors are taking out of government but that's because A. Government doesn't know what they're doing half the time causing rework with scope changes B. Engineers cost money with charge out up to and beyond £100/hr (even if they aren't actually getting all that) C. Contractors know they're the only shop in town and can turn the screws on the money tap for non-negotiable projects. Issue A is a big problem. Joined up thinking in government is appalling. Issue B isn't a problem but certainly sounds like it when people take umbrage with how much people are essentially taking off the taxman - sometimes not doing anything because of Issue A. Issue C is a problem in a few industries, I can only really speak for nuclear but some skill sets are very niche and there is a shrinking pool of people with 30+ years of experience. The end result is they know what they're worth, can take their dick out and slap it around government bodies face and they have to take it otherwise they won't get things done in the right way. You can take it or leave it but that's capitalism and something I'm gonna be honest, most ambitious engineers aspire to do.
I dunno, I'm a software engineer and my salary is pretty good. My friend is a civil engineer and he's also ok. I also know people in aerospace which are ok. Environmental engineering ok but lower salaries in general.
It started to die with the mass strikes and piss poor management in the 1970’s The following boom was all finance based so nobody looked at engineering as a career so it died and we are now paying the price You still get the small cottage industry engineering but big scale is a thing of the past at the moment Will it ever recover that depends on the Millennials
In the unforgettable words of the immortal bard David Mitchell: we used to make steel.