Why Engineering?
Becoming a professional engineer is a highly rewarding career. Professional engineers can be highly paid with generous salaries and benefits. As well as an attractive salary, you can enjoy a flexible career with the options to be office based, production based, self employed or travel the world on projects There is also considerable scope for a professional engineers to widen and develop responsibilities throughout their careers.. You can transfer your skills to different sectors and, with the correct qualifications, career progression into management is also widely achievable.
According to the EngineeringUK 2018 Report engineering is bigger than the UK retail, wholesale, financial and insurance sectors combined in term of GVA (Gross Value Added) (Section 1.1 of the Report) and 50% more productive in GVA/person that the retail/wholesale sectors. (Note: GVA is a measure of the goods and value produced by an industry.)
Engineering produces the majority of UK exports.
Engineering employs 5.6 million people of whom 2/3rds are practising engineers and technicians and has grown 5% in terms of numbers of enterprises in recent years. This is almost 19% of the UK’s total workforce
Professional Engineering is short of graduates partly because, recently, there have been fewer students taking STEM subjects at high school that enable them to follow a professional engineering career - less so in Scotland but down 4% in recent years in those taking STEM A Levels .
Job opportunities are therefore high – engineering is within the top 5 “In Demand” sectors for permanent jobs according to the 2018 EngineeringUK 2018 Report when there was an annual shortfall of 37,000 new graduates
62% of engineering graduates are in full time jobs within 6 months as compared to average 56% across all graduates (EngineeringUK 2018 Report).