Engineering salary 2024: Are you getting paid enough?

"Salaries 2024 engineering". I bet a lot of us have googled this to find out how much we should be making at our jobs. It's kind of a tricky topic because most of us, including myself, might be too shy to go around asking our friends and co-workers how much they make.

Thankfully, the Instagram poll option helped us with this. I asked our IronRingGirls community to share their salary range in a poll on our stories. I categorized this based on years of experience.

Before I share the results of the salary poll, here are a few points to consider:

1. The take home money can be salary + many other things

When someone says they make "x" amount of dollars, it can be the sum of their

base salary + bonus + other benefits like education fund or car allowance + company shares. So when you're comparing your salary, add up all of your benefits together.

2. Different industries in engineering have different salary ranges

Obviously we can't generalize all engineering disciplines in one category. Software, construction, manufacturing, design consulting, aerospace, mining..etc, the list goes on and on, they're all very different. Some industries are known to have higher starting salaries like software engineering. It also depends on the demand in that industry (the higher the demand, the more they'll pay for talent). So it's important to compare your salary to your discipline specific ranges. Should we perhaps start a poll on each discipline? Let me know below:

Should we have a poll on discipline specific salaries?

• Yes!
• No, I'm comfortable in my salary

3. Was everyone who answered in Canada? Probably not.

As you know, we specified the dollar values in the poll are CAD dollars. But does everyone on Instagram listen? Probably not. So consider some room for error there. Again, salaries range from country to country, actually, even from city to city. If you're working in a remote area, chances are your salary is higher, and you might have your accommodations paid for as well.

We talked about working in remote areas in our podcast with Abby who is a chemical engineering graduate working in mining in Saskatchewan! You can can listen to the episode here, she provides great insight on what her work is like on a day-to-day basis.

4. Consider the company size

I've been working in the same industry, construction management, for almost 10 years now. However, for a few years I worked in a smaller firm and took pay cut. The benefit for me was that I got exposure to a lot of experience which I loved, but my salary was well below average. Now that I work at a bigger firm, I feel like I'm more in tone with the industry standard. So when selecting jobs, especially early on in our careers, we also consider other factors in selecting a job. But since this blog post is about salaries, let's get to the good stuff.

Results to our poll on engineering salaries in Q1 2024:

How was it? Did it meet your expectations? If you've read all the above points and the survey and you feel like you need to go negotiate your salary, read the IronRingGirls community how-to guide on tips to negotiate your salary in 2024.

I hope this post was helpful. I know finances are a huge part of our lives and it can get intimidating to discuss it. Thankfully this community loves to share and we gained some insight!

If there's any topics you want me to write about or ask the community for help, let me know in the forum.

See you on the next post!

-Mina

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