Civil Engineers Salary Analysis in 2024 PART 3
How experience impacts yearly wages & starting salaries since 2021
Welcome to the final part of this civil engineering salary survey.
This final part will investigate the growth in salary over years of experiences and education levels in the United States. Additionally, this post will look at the starting salaries across sub-disciplines from 2021 to 2024.
Just to recap, reddit has salary data information which can be found here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/civilengineering/comments/162thwj/aug_2023_aug_2024_civil_engineering_salary_survey/
Part 1 explored the top-paying countries for civil engineers and compared salaries across sub-disciplines.
Part 2 examined the work hours per week in various states and provinces, job satisfaction across sub-disciplines, and compared salary and parental leave by gender.
For this Part 3, only US data will be included in this analysis to keep a uniform currency, and because the US has the highest sample size.
1. Salary vs. Years of Experience and Education
The figure below shows a line connected scatter plot with the years of experience on the X-axis and the Annual Salary on the Y-axis. All of the sub-discipline annual salaries were compressed into a mean value.
In general, annual salary does increase with greater years of experience. Still, its difficult to discern how education levels impact salary in the above figure.
The figure below smoothed out the data by mean averaging the years of experience in groups of 5 year increments. This smoothed out the representation of the data, and it’s more clear how education impact annual salary. The sample size is also shown (n=#).
From the above figure, the education level seems to co-relate with an increased starting salary and this wage gap seems to maintain throughout the course of the engineer’s career (on average).
The rate of increase over time on this averaged chart seems to be more or less linear for bachelors and masters degree engineers, and potentially exponential for doctorate level engineers, which speaks to the higher earning possibilities for PhD holders.
There is limited sample sizes for high school diploma level engineers, which makes sense as people generally need at least a bachelor’s degree to become an engineer.
Although these results are generalized, every engineer has a unique career path and annual salaries may be quite variable depending on a multitude of factors not expressed in these numbers.
2. Starting Salary over 2021 to 2024
The past 3 years of survey data was analyzed. The line graph below shows the starting salary across the past three years (between 2021 and 2024). The years of experience between 0 and 2 years was grouped together and the salary was mean-averaged.
In 2021-2022, power/electrical, government/municipal, and water resource engineers had the highest starting salaries, while aviation and environmental engineers lagged behind.
In 2022-2023, transportation starting salary took 1st place while power/electrical came in at 2nd. Aviation still in last place and land development dropped to 2nd last.
In 2023-2024, aviation engineers shot up from the lowest to the highest starting salaries, which makes sense in the context of the pandemic lockdowns, as travel demand grows, the requirement for airport upkeep also increases. Construction engineering has the 2nd highest starting salary in 2023-2024, which also makes sense as construction did start to ramp up in this year. Environmental engineering starting salaries fell to last place.
Aviation engineers do have a small sample size in this survey so the results might be skewed, but this could also speak to the lack of new engineers in the sector.
Inflation should also be taken into consideration. $1 USD in 2021 is worth $1.16 USD in 2024, representing about an 8% inflation rate between each survey time period. The following figures show the percent increases in mean and median starting salaries. If the percentage is less than 8%, the purchasing power of that sub-discipline’s starting salary has actually decreased year over year.
OPINION: Another underrated concern with inflation is the deteriorating quality of engineers over time. If there is a gradual slippage in the value of engineering salaries over time, the brightest and most effective humans will opt to pursue more lucrative careers like finance, or technology. Less effective engineers over time will lead to more frequent subpar outputs (or civil infrastructure in this case). This is a shame. Technology has grown rapidly over the past 50 years, to the point where most humans have a mini computer in their pockets, but architecturally, the built-environments in the west hasn’t changed significantly over the same time period. If anything, western infrastructure seems to be more deteriorated now compared to the past. There needs to be inspiration to care about the aesthetics of the built environment if there is to be a resurgence of architecturally epic infrastructure.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading my analysis and commentary for this comprehensive salary survey. I want to continue creating more content in this data analysis publication, and pursue more creative opportunities too. If you have any data trends you’d like me to look into please feel free to send me an email at :
pj-pacificvibes@outlook.com
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Oh and here’s a link to my earlier posts on this topic:
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