💰 Glassdoor estimates the base pay of an electrical engineer in the US to be 95000$ per year, which makes EE a very lucrative job. But I want to tell you 5 Reasons why you should not be an engineer in 2022.

👷‍♀️ I’ve been studying electrical engineering for 9 years with 2 more years to go, and I’ve also taught Electrical Engineering at one of the most prestigious universities in Pakistan for a year. So I like to think I know a thing or two about being an engineer.

💵 Life as an engineer is certainly not without perks. As I mentioned, engineering is one of the most highly paid jobs in the world, especially if your expertise lean more on the software and programming side. An Electrical Engineer at Apple makes 148K per year on average with some of them making over 200K a year. So with all that money pouring in, what are some of the reasons you shouldn’t choose engineering as a career? Well for starters

📈 Growth Rate

In Canada according to labor market assessment, there will be a total of 13,300 EE jobs between 2019 to 2028 while 16600 are seeking jobs that include graduates as well as immigrants. By the way here’s a map of new job postings in Canada. The demand and supply of engineers are pretty balanced in developed countries but the situation is not the same in countries like India and Pakistan. A lot more people are studying engineering and graduating as engineers each year, than the number of jobs available in the country. The growth rate in jobs is very slow compared to the growth rate in graduates. As a result, more than half of the engineering graduates either end up switching careers or working underpaid jobs. Only 3% of engineering graduates get high-quality jobs in India.

🏃‍♀️ Competition

What happens when 100 people are competing for 1 job opening? Yup, you guessed it right. Engineering is extremely competitive. You need to be the best of the best to be able to get a decent job or get out of the country to find a better future.

🧠 Difficulty

1. The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) found that between 40% to 50% of engineering students drop out or change their majors. Among engineering fields, electrical engineering is particularly;y hard, because there is a lot of abstract thinking involved. Unlike the other majors, like civil engineering, where students can physically feel or concretely see what they are designing, changing, and building, electrical engineers have to imagine what they are constructing or learning in their minds.
2. While all engineering majors incorporate a lot of math, EE is known for being heavy in trigonometry, calculus, and math that becomes progressively more nonlinear as students complete the major. • In nonlinear math, exact answers are difficult to come by.
3. EE majors also use partial differential equations (PDE) more frequently than other engineering majors. These equations are notoriously abstract and difficult to think about conceptually. They are used to aid the solution of physical problems involving functions of several variables (electrodynamics, heat, sound, waves, quantum mechanics, etc.), yet the equations themselves can never truly be solved.
4. Programming courses extend to hardware programming and things that work in theory don’t always work in practice. Digital Logic Design and embedded systems courses.

🙅‍♀️ Satisfaction

CareerExplore.com conducted a survey and asked people to rate their job satisfaction based on 5 parameters. These parameters were Salary, Meaning, Personality Fit, work environment, and skill utilization. As it turns out, engineers rate their career happiness 3.1 out of 5 stars which puts them in the bottom 40% of careers. Most were satisfied with salary but their satisfaction does not quite extend beyond salary.

1. Salary 3.4/5
2. Meaning 2.8/5
3. Personality fit 3.6
4. Work Environment 3.4
5. Skills utilization 3.1

🤷‍♀️ Gender Gap

Maybe you’re a female who doesn’t want to work on an oil rig as the only female electrical engineer surrounded by 100 men, or maybe you’re a man who doesn’t want to work surrounded by men. The gender gap in engineering fields is one of the widest (88% Male).

If you are a girl reading this and I have scared you too much about being an engineer, well not all is lost. I’ve found engineering to be a very rewarding career for me personally as a woman. And I have developed coping mechanisms that helped me not just survive but thrive as an engineer. Watch this video to uncover the secrets that helped me as a girl in the engineering classroom.

See you next week!

Sadia ❤️

❤My Favourite Things

📕Book:

I signed up for a trial of Blinkist for a week and listened to a few books. None stayed with me long enough to include in this post so I have canceled the free trial.

📝Quote:

Practicing In Public is what separates aspiring writers from professional writers from The Art and Business of Online Writing by Nicolas Cole Mather

🎶Music:

I love the Season 14 of Coke Studio Pakistan. You can watch it by searching for it on YouTube.

🔍I’m Learning:

Still learning touch typing. I have included capital letters and symbols now. I’m actually practicing it in public by posting my progress daily on Twitter.

I see that you’ve made it to the end. If you liked this blog post, check out the other stuff I talk about on my YouTube Channel. Don’t forget to subscribe!😉

Sadia Khaf

A channel about higher education abroad, scholarships, and career advice. 

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