Engineering salaries in the UK are a bit of a controversial thing. Many engineers, including my friends, will tell you that they’re underpaid. However, a quick Google search will lead you to various resources that tell you that engineers are one of the top paid career professionals. Some articles even mention that engineers earned the highest salaries, only next to medical professionals and business graduates five years after leaving the university. So let’s look at the numbers here to examine the above statements. The average salary of an engineer from a reliable source is £47,896 a year, which was estimated through a salary survey in 2018. Though this number looks rosy at the first instance, it might likely have been skewed due to the high-earning directors in six figures at the top engineering firms. Also, there could be many hits and misses in this area as the salaries advertised for the roles are not often transparent, making it hard to comment for broader engineering careers.
One area of engineering careers where the salary budget is advertised is for the roles like research fellow or associate (generally called postdoctoral researchers) within the academic institutions in the UK. The pay from the band's start to the end with the elaborate list of required skills and responsibilities is documented in the job description pack. You might be taken by surprise to learn that the average postdoctoral salary in the UK is £31,000 annually. This figure is £461 lower than the average UK salary recorded in April 2020. For example, a recent post advertised for a research fellow at the Brunel University London is advertised at £30,497 plus £2,166 of London allowance, which results in a total starting salary of £ 32,663. One of the most reputed universities based in an expensive city with no additional allowance, the University of Cambridge, pays its research associate a starting salary of £33,309. Not to mention here the eye-watering rental prices in both these cities. This is low and discouraging for someone who had spent four years of training on a PhD on top of the undergraduate degree, and mind you, that average contract for a postdoctoral researcher is two years. And it is not unlikely to come across postdoctoral contracts that are set for six months. With the system trying to keep you on your toes, most postdocs end up working much longer hours in the hope of contract extension beyond their fixed term, which is rather unpaid labour.
I have also known some of my friends and colleagues, who have dismissed some of these arguments by commenting that ‘engineering and research are all about passion and not money (or security)’. I agree that someone can’t become an engineer just for the sake of money as salaries received may not exactly reflect the level of training. However, a huge disparity between the level of training and compensation is of concern as these are the people, we rely on to solve the grand challenges of inventing and developing technologies to get to net-zero, efficient manufacturing, improved supply-chain, energy or healthcare systems. With the increasing campaigns on improving all forms of diversity within engineering, it is more important than ever to fix the wage gap and make STEM research a stable and sustainable career choice for the brilliant minds out there. As it currently stands, universities in the UK are a hotbed of innovation and payment for the innovators does not reflect so!
This makes me question what expectations we are setting for someone who wants to dedicate their life to research in a STEM career-low pay with job uncertainty, all of it painted with the words of innovation? I am sure there could be many reasons, including one major reason of supply and demand economics. That makes me think, is there an oversupply of engineering graduates that has led to lower pay? Many sources will point towards the case of oversupply but in terms of oversupply of ‘unskilled engineers’. I’ve come across instances where engineering employers were looking for the candidate with the exact number of skills and were not prepared to train even though the candidate might have possessed 80% of the skills needed to do the job. This points to the mindset that the engineers who are starting out or those with few years of experience are treated as disposable and hence handed out low pay. There might be other professions on the same wage level, but you do not hear as much about the shortages in those professions.
At this point, I am not exactly sure what ‘shortage’ actually means in this context? If it is with ‘unskilled engineers’, how do we make sure that they are skilled in the first place than producing engineers in excess?
References:
www.gq-magazine.co.uk
www.nature.com
www.imeche.org
www.theengineer.co.uk
