Is this job likely to reward you for sticking with it through pay raises and promotions? The higher a job’s “experience quotient,” the more you are likely to get as you stay there.
Experience quotient percentile
Take a minute to look at how much you might expect your salary to increase with each five years' experience, as well as how the numbers working at each age change. Does this seem to be a job for the young or the old, or could it be a career offering steady salary growth for many years?
How do benefits for this career compare to other jobs? The availability of health care, especially employer provided health care, and pension plans can add significantly to the value of compensation you receive in a career. These charts compare how this career compares to other careers with regard to health care and pension plans.
Some jobs are more stressful than others, and some are just plain dangerous. The following list gives the percentages of specialized engineers who report hazardous or difficult situations typically occurring at least once a week.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), specialized engineers typically hold a bachelor's degree.
Sometimes the typical education identified by the BLS differs a bit from the reality of the how much education current workers actually have. The donut shows the education level held by people currently working as specialized engineers as reported in responses to the American Community Survey.
Here are the top college degrees held by the 81% of people in this job who have at least a bachelor's degree. Some of degrees may link to multiple programs due to the way Census classifies college majors. Click on a program to learn more about career opportunities for people who major in that field.
This table shows the college majors held by people working as specialized engineers. If you see "**" before the name of a degree/program, that means this field is one that the Department of Education believes is preparatory for this career. However, you can see from this list that those recommendations are far from your only path to this job!
With the following sankey diagram, you can follow the top ten bachelor's degrees held by people working as specialized engineers, and then, in turn, you can see the 10 occupations that hire the most of each degree's graduates. We hope this provides ideas for similar jobs and similar fields of study.
Some careers tend to be centered in specific parts of the country. For example, most jobs in fashion are in New York or California. Let's see if your dream job is easy to find in your dream location! We have a few choices for viewing the data that can help you get a full employment picture.
Select a state to see local area details
Number of Specialized Engineers per 1,000 workers (ACS)
Which states hire the most specialized engineers? We wonder if that's a fair question since states come in all sizes, so instead let's start with the question of which states have the highest density of people working as specialized engineers. You can choose to view the number of jobs per state if you prefer.
Salaries by state
Let's get a feel for where specialized engineers earn the highest salaries. There are several choices for which data we consider and how we view that data, and each can lead to different conclusions, so please read on...
Median salary versus state ratio
We use two methods to compare salaries across states:
In-state comparisons: the ratio of median (middle) salaries for specialized engineers compared to the median salary for all people working in each state, or
Median salary: the unaltered median salaries for specialized engineers.
We hope the ratio allows perspective about how salaries may compare to the regional cost-of-living.
The darkest shading corresponds to states in which specialized engineers earn the highest salary when compared to other jobs in the state. We think this figure might be a better indicator than the actual salary for your buying power as a state resident.
Select a state to see local area details
Location-adjusted median salary for Specialized Engineers (ACS for all specialties)
4% of Specialized engineers are working part time.
We’ve found that some jobs have a huge number of part-time workers, and typically that is because they are unable to find full-time work or the job itself can’t provide full-time hours. With 4% part-time workers, this occupation has a lower percentage of part-time workers than 83% of careers.
The median salary for all full-time male workers in the
US exceeds the full-time median salary for women
by 19%.
The situation is a little better for specialized engineers, with the
median salary for men 12%
higher than the median salary for women.