The video discusses whether an electrical engineering degree is worth pursuing. The speaker defines electrical engineering and discusses the various career paths and earning potential associated with this degree.
The speaker also analyzes the degree’s job satisfaction, demand, and x factors (such as automation and outsourcing). The pros and cons of pursuing an electrical engineering degree are discussed, and the speaker rates the degree as a 9 out of 10 overall, citing the high earning potential and flexibility of career paths as major positives.
CREDIT TO:Shane Hummus
First thing we need to do is define what electrical engineering is.
Basically, anything where you use electricity in order to solve problems is going to be related to electrical engineering. This is going to be all about the implementation, control, design, etc, of electrical equipment.
This is one of the more common engineering bachelor degrees with around 16 000 people graduating every year, and there really are a ton of different career paths. You can go down with this degree, as you can imagine just about everything around us involves electricity. Next, we’re going to move on to salary or earning potential so, with an electrical engineering degree you’d expect to make around 71 000 a year starting off and 121 000 in mid-career pay.
You can compare that to the highest paying degree and one of the lowest paying degrees, and you see that it’s very good. I generally recommend that you try to aim for a degree or career where you can make at least seventy five thousand dollars a year, because studies have shown that that will maximize your happiness. In other words, your happiness does in fact decrease the more money you make up until a certain point, which is around 75 000 a year or so now, if you became an electrical engineer, they make around a hundred and one thousand dollars a year. That’S pretty good, of course, but there’s a ton of different career options. You could go down.
You could become another type of engineer, for instance like a biomedical engineer, and they make around 91 000 and engineers in general, make much more than your average degree about 3.5 million dollars over a lifetime versus 2.4 million for all of the other types of majors. Now, like i said, there’s a ton of different career paths. You can go down i’ll, have a few of them pop up on the screen, but there’s a lot more than this and you don’t just make a lot of money from the salary with this one.
A lot of people will end up starting their own business, which will give you the opportunity to make much more than you ever could with a job. So, overall, this one is definitely going to be a 10 out of 10 when it comes to earning potential or salary. Now, when it comes to satisfaction, i like to break things down into a few different metrics job. Satisfaction and meaning are the two most important things in my opinion. So when you look at meaning, which is how much your career positively impacts the world, you see electrical engineering degree graduates have a score of around 55 percent.
You can compare this to a really good score and a really bad score and you’ll see that it’s average or above average, those who end up becoming electrical engineers have a score of around 58, which again is above average. However, the job satisfaction tends to be on the higher side. It comes in at around 72 percent and again you can compare that to a career that has really high satisfaction and one that has really low satisfaction and you’ll see that overall, it comes out as above average. Now there’s a lot of different career paths. You can go down with this, which is a good thing, a lot of the time.
People who get engineering degrees don’t end up becoming engineers, but there’s a lot of job opportunities out there for them, because engineering is so well respected. Companies pretty much know that they’re getting a really hard-working, really smart, practical problem solver when they hire someone with an engineering degree and overall engineering is the third least regretted type of degree. If you compare them to all different types, only around 15 percent of people regret getting the degree, and the main reason is because the best jobs out there require advanced degrees like a master’s or a doctorate. However, i always like to say here that this is the most subjective section and a lot of the time it’s going to have more to do with the company. You work for the people, you work with the career you’re in the industry, you’re in etc.
It’s also extremely subjective from person to person. So if you don’t like math, you probably don’t want to go into engineering, but with that being said, all things being equal and using objective standards. I’M going to have to give this one a pretty good score of 8 out of 10 Next, we’re going to be talking about demand, and this is basically how much your skills that you learn from whatever degree you get are going to be coveted by businesses and hiring managers out there. So, basically how many positions are open for a certain. You know experience level or skill set and then how many people are out there that can actually fill those positions.
If there’s not enough people, it’s simple law of supply and demand and they’re going to have to pay you better and they’ll likely treat you better as well. Just because there’s not enough people and they want to keep you so when it comes to demand. If you want to become an electrical engineer, they are growing at about three percent and that’s with 328 000 jobs available already meaning over the next 10 years. There’s going to be 10 800 new jobs that pop up for bioengineer it’ll be around 21 000 jobs. Right now, it’s growing a little bit faster than average at around 5 percent, meaning over the next 10 years.
There’s going to be 1 000 jobs that pop up. So one thing you’ll notice here is engineering degrees are usually growing around average or maybe a little faster than average, which isn’t all that impressive when you compare them to technology or healthcare degrees with tech or healthcare degrees and careers that you end up going into a Lot of the time, they’re growing at 10, 20, sometimes you’ll even see 30 over the next 10 years, and so you might think a lot of these engineering degrees are overrated. But when you look into it a little bit more, you see that many people who get these degrees end up going into completely unrelated careers that still tend to pay pretty well. This is because a lot of companies have the hiring philosophy that you want to hire. The smartest people, and not necessarily people that are trained for that specific job.
This is very common in the finance industry, for instance, where they basically just want to get the smartest and most talented people, and they think that they can teach them the particular skills they need to know later on. And they pretty much know that if you can make it through a rigorous engineering curriculum, then you’re probably going to be very smart and also hard-working. So with that being said, when you search the term electrical engineering degrees on monster.com you’re, going to see that 23 000 job offers pop up, you can compare this to a degree. That’s an extremely high demand like computer science or one that’s not in demand at all.
Like anthropology and 23 000 is actually really good. Computer science is a total outlier in this equation, but 23 000 is gonna be in the top like 95th percentile easily. So there’s a lot of people out there that are looking for the skill set of people who graduate with an electrical engineering degree. On top of that, there’s a survey i like to reference from nace, where they basically contacted a bunch of the top companies in the united states and they asked them what type of graduates they’re looking to hire. There’s a couple different surveys and the two types of degrees that are most commonly at the top were business and engineering degrees.
Sometimes business was number one, and sometimes engineering was number one and so there’s clearly a lot of demand here and electrical engineering is going to be one of the more flexible types of engineering degrees as well. So there’s a lot of different areas that you can go with it. A lot of people will end up going into the technology industry working on hardware, sometimes even doing software engineering. So this one is going to score pretty well here, i’m going to give it a 9 out of 10 Next on the list we’re going to be talking about x, factors – and this is anything that we didn’t talk about before. Usually i talk about automation, outsourcing skills, flexibility, etc.
So, first of all, pretty much everybody knows this engineers over a lifetime make more money than any other type of degree. The average degree recipient is going to earn around 2.4 million dollars over a lifetime, whereas the average engineering grad will earn 3.5 million. But what’s great about engineering degrees is not only do you earn more?
If you become an engineer, you go into some kind of technical skill, even if you go into something like art, you’re going to earn 3 million over a lifetime – and this just goes to show. There’s something about getting an engineering degree that makes people really successful. It could be that people who go for those types of degrees would have been successful anyways or it could be that the types of skills you learn are really transferable, pretty much any career. You go into could be correlation or causation. Nobody really knows for sure, but in my opinion it has a little bit to do with both.
Now, when you look at electrical engineering as a skill set you’ll see that it’s one of the highest paid types of skills. According to ziprecruiter’s skills index, it comes in ranked 73 and the best possible skill is 88 out of 100 and the worst one is around 8 out of a hundred. So you see that that’s definitely on the higher side. So what that basically means is businesses are willing to pay people who have this skill set, really good money. It’s pretty much simple supply and demand.
There’s not a lot of people who have this skill set and businesses need people who have those skills and so therefore they’re willing to pay them more. Now it comes to automation. Electrical engineers likely will not be automated, there’s, probably about a 10 chance or so, which is on the lower side, and when it comes to outsourcing. It would also be very difficult to do this because it’s really creative work and you kind of have to be in person talking to other people, bouncing ideas off of each other and touching stuff in real life in order to make it work. I always like to mention that engineering degrees are the number one degree that creates the most millionaires and there’s a reason for that.
Part of it, of course, has to do with the high salary and the fact that you’re going into careers where you’re making a lot of money, but i think even more important than that is because of the fact that engineers make really good entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship. At its core is basically just problem. Solving and engineering is practical problem solving a lot of the time, but people will get a few years of experience, learn some skills and then they’ll recognize an opportunity. They will quit their job or maybe they won’t quit their job they’ll.
Just do it on the side as a side hustle and then eventually they become successful and they start a business that does really well engineering degrees, not only create the most millionaires, but they also create the most billionaires. So you can kind of see why that is. Engineering is extremely flexible and electrical is one of the more flexible types. A lot of people will end up working in the technology industry, for instance, you might become a software developer or something along those lines. Now, when it comes to difficulty, engineering degrees are extremely difficult.
So keep that in mind there’s a very high dropout rate, so you need to be ready for that. Overall, i’m going to give this one a score of 9 out of 10 It’s really really good. So some of the positives here the pay is going to be fantastic. There’s a lot of different career paths. You can go down it’s one of the most flexible types of engineering degrees, there’s also going to be a good amount of job demand.
Just right off the bat for careers that are related to electrical engineering, some of the cons is that it’s going to be highly stressful engineering degrees are very difficult to get, and this is something you want to keep in mind. There’s a high dropout rate for a reason, and some of the better paying careers and career opportunities, especially if you want to go into electrical engineering specifically, might require advanced level degrees. So, overall, i’m going to give this one an excellent score of 9 out of 10 This is a very, very good degree. Of course, you don’t want to go into it if you’re, not the right person for it, you need to make sure that it matches you specifically because a lot of this is going to be very subjective and different from person to person. But with that being said, this is a pretty good one, because even if you end up not wanting to become an electrical engineer, it’s flexible enough that you can go in all kinds of different directions.
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