2018 Salary and Career Report: Part 1, Satisfaction Generates Staying Power (.PDF Download)

If we could pay the 1,200 readers who responded to H&P’s annual salary survey a C-Note for every time they used the words satisfaction, opportunity, and problem-solving to describe their job experience, they might just earn their current salary. Well, maybe a month’s worth. In fact, satisfaction is such a big part of what you do, we decided to make it the lead topic in this year’s Salary Survey report. Your reactions inspired the editors to turn your input into a multi-part series. Education and salary details will follow in succeeding installments.

Let’s show you the money right up front:
The average annual salary for to H&P’s 2018 Salary Survey younger than 35 is $67K. Respondents over 50 averaged $106K. Sandwiched between them, respondents 35 to 50 reported an average annual salary of about $100K.

“It is cheaper to build a rock star than it is to buy one.”

We’ll take a deeper dive into salaries, bonuses, and other compensation numbers in Part 3 of this series, but respondents also told us industrial employers had better expand their focus to bigger-picture factors like career satisfaction and education. The mainstream news media are giving their audiences plenty of reasons to feel uneasy about our world’s problems, so now would be a good time for industry to show how the fixers of this world—engineers, technicians, and mechanics—envision the future. Although the picture they paint isn’t entirely rosy, many of you take tremendous satisfaction from finding ingenious ways to fix broken things and make the industrial world a better place.

The details behind that satisfaction will show why we’re going there first.