👩🔬I’m an Electrical Engineer doing a Ph.D. in Machine Learning. It is one of the most well-paid jobs in 2022, and I’m telling you not to become an Electrical Engineer.
💰How Much Do Electrical Engineers Earn?
Glassdoor estimates the base pay of an electrical engineer in the US to be $95K per year, which makes EE a very lucrative job. Entry-level jobs usually start at $67K and the higher-end jobs are all in 6 figure salaries. Salaries of electrical engineers at Apple usually average at about $148K a year, with senior engineers earning beyond $200K🤑. While all these numbers can make electrical engineering seem like a lucrative job, I want to share with you 5 reasons why it may not be a great profession.
1. Job Opportunities👷♀️
In Canada according to labor market assessment, there will be a total of 13,300 EE jobs between 2019 to 2028 but16600 people seeking jobs. This estimate includes graduates as well as immigrants. While there is a little gap between the demand and supply of electrical engineers in Canada, the situation is not quite so worldwide. Times of India reported that only 3% of electrical engineer graduates get high-quality tech jobs in India📉. Becoming an electrical engineer in India or Pakistan is an extremely poor choice right now because universities are producing many more electrical engineers than the demand for them. While I don’t have the most up-to-date and comprehensive statistics to prove that, I can tell you from experience that almost 50% of my fellow electrical engineers switched careers paths after graduation. While immigration is still an option, it’s not a viable option for everybody, and no country will accept more immigrant electrical engineers than their estimated demand for them⚖. Here’s a map of current electrical engineering jobs in Canada, so see for yourself.
2. Competition🥇
One of the highest-paying professions is one of the most competitive ones. Surprise surprise 😲.
Of course, it is competitive. Everybody wants a good salary. A lot of people apply to electrical and mechanical engineering programs worldwide and out of all those applicants, usually the top 1-2% make it past the first merit lists. When you’re studying with the top 1-2% merit caliber students🥇🥇🥇, don’t cry yourself to sleep because you can’t maintain a 3.5+ GPA. Coming from a top 2% group and later scoring <2 GPA can put anyone into depression and anxiety 😓 because they are not used to such low grades, but the reality of competition and relative grading systems is that someone will be at the bottom. For high achievers, that hits you very hard.
3. Difficulty💪
Welcome to the life of non-linear math💹. 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. 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.
The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) found that between 40% to 50% of engineering students drop out or change their majors. EE majors 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. 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 will have you questioning your theory vs reality all the time.
4. Job Satisfaction😃
CareerExplore.com conducted a survey and asked people to rate their job satisfaction based on 5 parameters. Their parameters were Salary, Meaning, Personality Fit, work environment, and skill utilization. As it turns out, electrical engineers rate their career happiness 3.1 out of 5 stars which puts them in the bottom 40% of careers. Here’s a summary.
- Salary 3.4/5
- Meaning 2.8/5
- Personality fit 3.6
- Work Environment 3.4
- Skills utilization 3.1
5. Gender Gap🤵💃
Enter an Environmental engineering class and chances are you’ll find about a 50% male to female ratio. Enter an electrical engineering class and tell me if you can distinguish the 2 girls sitting in the first row from the 48 other guys? Electrical engineering is highly dominated (88%) by the male population so 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 other men without a sight of a female for months and years. You’ve only got one life, pick a career you won’t hate for the rest of your life.
❤My Favourite Things
🎬YouTube Video:
It’s my old video about how to survive electrical engineering as a girl 🤣
📕Book:
I’m Reading Millionaire Fastlane - MJ DeMarco (non-fiction), and I’m reading Elantris - Brandon Sanderson (fiction) in parallel. Both are amazing. You should read them.
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!😉
