@Mr^B Great post. Would be interested in stories from any Engineers (Freefaller)?
Only logged in because someone pointed me to the thread and thought I'd offer some insights from my perspective since I was asked for it. Going beyond £50k was more a journey of going above and below that salary, as various roles offered different benefits but it was never my focus really, and I was more of a "coaster" for a while rather than really applying myself. I also realised priorities change as your grow older and things in life change.
I started working when I was 16, working during holidays, every other weekend for an engineering firm. This was in the 90s when IT, electronics, and tech was evolving ridiculously fast. I had always been interested in that side of things so wanted to get myself off to a good start before going to uni. Clearly this was just part time/weekend work, but starting to earn money as a teen was really exciting and offered me a lot more independence from my parents.
After my A-levels, I wanted to travel, but also work a bit to get some money for Uni. So worked full time for 6 months, for the same engineering firm, then travelled for a 4-5 months. I then went to study Electronic and Systems Engineering at uni. I supported myself through uni, doing other bits of work, bar work, door work, and during the holidays back to the engineering firm to top up my skills, money, but also to apply some of my learnings to add value to the company. I kept this up throughout university. It must be noted that I didn't get any support from my parents (I refused it), and the LEA paid for my uni place, plus having taken out the full loan amount.
After graduating I was offered a role at a few engineering firms, but actually went back to the SME because not only what they did was really interesting and exciting to me, but they also offered a good 2-3k above the other salaries and I already knew everyone there. I did everything from systems integration, design, to actual physical installation. Later as I developed I got into more project management and consultancy work for our teams as the company grew. I landed a couple of promotions, and when I left the company in my mid/late 20s I had added about £10k to my starting salary.
Within my first year of starting my first job I rented a flat and moved out of my parent's home - it was time to grow up. I say this to put it in context that I was living independently so my earnings were important to sustain my day to day life and responsibilities.
I felt I had outgrown the SME, and wanted to develop more skills in a different business. But also they didn't believe in training, courses or anything like that. I felt I had a lot more to learn. I joined a large FTSE100 in an operational management role. This netted me nearly another £6-7k increase. That was a massive baptism of fire. Long hours, toxic behaviours, aggressive management, and very "old school" ways of working. The reason I jumped ship was because I was getting itchy feet and wanted to do more as I said, but also had a chance to go through a fast-track management programme to develop my skills and ultimately earn more money. Feedback after the interview was that "I was the polar opposite of the sort of people they usually hire" - which I guess is why they offered me the role, to try and shake things up.
I'm not going to lie, I was floundering a little (a lot), it was a secure logistics company dealing with high value items and cash. It was fast paced, poorly managed, lots of firefighting, politics, and no one wanted to do anything other than what they wanted to do unless you were able to be the most aggressive **** in the company. Not my style at all. My skills lie in analysing processes, interacting with people, and questioning everything we do to understand if we can do things better. This ****storm was not fun or exciting. However, despite the 10-14hr days, weekend calls (24hr operations 365 days of the year) I was determined, certainly even more so after hearing some feedback that I "wouldn't last 6 months". Being a tenacious yet stubborn individual, though also rather sensitive I didn't want to let "them" win.
So I gritted my teeth and cracked on, I got under the skin of the business, unturned rocks, aired dirty laundry, and became a fount of useful knoweldge to operational effectiveness of the business. I was exhausted (I was doing 70hrs a week over the course of several months working weekends too), but my efforts were being noticed, as I was tasked to lead a "expert squad" for want of a better word, to fix one of the poorest performing sites in London.
To note, whilst all that was going on I was also in a ludicruous amount of debt - I lived a pretty outrageous lifestyle for the first 10 years of my professional life. Lots of travel, cars/bikes, women (ashamed at my behaviour looking back at that period of my life), gadgets and gizmos etc... I had clocked up in excess of £20k of debt. Another reason why I was working hard was to clear this debt. Live indepenedently, still go on holiday, and not go hungry. I actually managed to clear my debts, my student loan, and start saving by the time I turned 30. It helped that I had managed to settle down with someone who helped give me some focus, and support. But that's a story for another time.
As a result of my successes in turning around one of our poor sites, I put forward a suggestion to the board (a bold move for a 20-something year old) to introduce a dedicated team of continuous improvement / business improvement specialists for the business. It was approved, and so my opportunity to change the business through my engineering skills, and mindset came to life. I had to apply for the role of course, and successfully joined the newly formed continous improvement team. Unfortunately owing to the fact I was an internal candidate it only netted me around £4k but it was a grade bump up, so had more benefits, better pension, bonus, company car etc...
At this point I had breached the £50k barrier.
Over the period of 3-4 years, we completely ripped up the weeds, upturned all the rocks, aired all the dirty laundry of the business. Lots of people left, or were asked to leave as a result, lots of improvements across the business started to flourish with our support. The toxic aggressive environment was changing. We actually empowered staff/people to collaborate, share ideas, and seek better ways of working. We implemented systematic and well designed changes. I became a lean six sigma black belt as a result, and really started to learn how to deliver effective change using a more scientific and pragmatic approach. However, this was all very well and good for our internal systems, I was more interested in the happy clappy stuff (there's a surprise). So my focus was very much on the customer experience side of things, asking the questions "what do our customers want" - believe or not no one had every asked that question, we were just about getting money, and arrogantly thought we could get away with being more expensive, as we were the best at what we do (we weren't - the competition was heating up and it was affecting our profit margins).
After extensive painful work (also bear in mind the Olympics happened in between all this), we managed to:
- Empower staff to share ideas, and develop better ways of working
- Realised several £m of true bottom line benefits (the business was a several £bn turnover company)
- Reduced claims by 74% via better processes and complaints by 57% through better communication
- Dedicated business improvement team implementing small changes which aggregated to lots of improvements
- Improvements to working conditions
- Proper dialogue between the union reps and senior management
- Less fire fighting and "old school" aggressive management
- Plus a lot more I'm sure...
It really was a fantastic story, and all that effort, broken relationships (both mine, and professional ones!), praise from internal/external customers, and probably taking several years off my life by some poor decisions made... they decided to cut our team by 50% because we had achieved such good results and felt that we didn't need the whole team....
Hells bells... I made the cut fortunately, but had to cover the whole of the UK rather than just the south, commuting (by car) regularly to Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool to name but a few, I lived in SE London. This was a massive step back. And despite having been offered a more senior role, I felt spent, so it was time to move on. The business clearly didn't realise to keep things going you needed support, and the company hadn't developed an organic capability to allow it to happen without support. It still needed nurturing to make it work.
In my next role I actually took a pay cut, so dropped below the 50k window (basic salary) and went to work for a massive public sector infrastructure (civil engineering) megaproject, heading back to engineering was always my dream. However, I was debt free, in a good relationship, some savings, in good health, and the role had amazing benefits (public sector golden pension, health care, free travel and crazy annual leave entitlement). The job was also incredibly rewarding, pathfinding, and industry leading. I had started to really make a niche for my skills and capability in an engineering environment. Whilst the pay was less the overal benefit package amounted to 1.5x the basic slary anyway. As a result of my team's work we received a huge amount of industry acolade, invited to speak at various .gov consortia, sought out by universities, SMEs, start ups and organisations to help them deliver and exploit opportunities in engineering for innovation, continuous improvement and cultural change.
The work was hard, but incredibly rewarding, I probably worked slightly less hours than the FTSE100, but I got so much more out of it. How do we change how engineering works / behaves / delivers projects? How do we stimulate R&D and innovation in construction and civil engineering? How do we move away from the status quo / tried and tested? How do we learn to celebrate failure? This was incredibly exciting times and created a tipping point for the industry and myself. Also it was amazing being part of a multi £bn megaproject.
This led me to work for a .gov body to specifically address the above area but across the whole sectore. It was exciting as I got to interface with the whole industry, multiple major infrastructuire projects to seek out the best engineering opportunities, best practices and start to revolutionise how engineering behaves. Typically engineering is a bit old school still, early starts, late finishes, bums on seats, and very much about the tried and tested, and "we don't want this new stuff here" mentality. This put my back in excess of this £50k with some nice benefits. Since there is a massive drive from the government, and engineering/construction has been offered a new sector deal and they're willing to plough resource and capability into it, it's an exciting time to be part of engineering/construction.
However, I was actually headhunted to lead this very capability in a major engineering company, almost doubling my salary, I would have been a fool to have turned down the offer. I do work long hours now (and spend over 3hrs a day commuting) but am a business leader and part of the leadership team, which does offer me the chance to be more strategic and have more influence to implement change and create opportunities for the business - within a year I managed to bring a significant uplift to the bottom line, not because I'm amazing, but because I have the experience, and know the right questions to ask, and know who to speak to and what hadn't been done to date. It's just seeking the opportunity and exploiting the areas you know can be fruitful. Experience adds so much more than just a degree or a qualification in my opinion.
It took me around 9 years to breach 50k - can't say I chose the easiest path though. And I didn't really start pushing myself until about 6 years into my career. Now... it took nearly 16 years to get to my somewhat generous salary, but I realised that the engineering industry has a plethora of opportunity. This is why despite moving out of it, actually really helped me as it offered skills and visibility of different industries which diversified my own capabilities. I think diversifying your experiences can really add a lot of value to whatever industry you work in. These salaries, and responsibilities, come at a bit of a cost - you do need to put the hours in, be visible, and deliver results. There is more pressure to perform, and no magic blue pill will help in times of crisis. So you need to either build that resilience and have that tenacity or accept that earning such high earnings is not as worthwhile. Part of me would be happy to earn half the amount but be able to walk to work - however, I have become used to the spending power you get - it's hard not to. You end up living to your means. Though it does mean I can save more which is something I never really strictly in the past, it was more ad-hoc saving.
Grad engineers can start from £30k, and salaries augment nicely. Furthermore, most companies will support you to become chartered, if you're an engineer I cannot urge you enough to aim for chartership, even if not an engineer become professionally qualified, it really does help set you apart. In a large tier 1 contractor, an engineering manager, or lead engineer can easily earn in excess of £65k with heads of engineering, or specialist engineers netting well over £80k. If you aim towards consultancies and design houses, you can also earn some rather astounding salaries. Sure, you'll never earn what hedge fund managers earn, or lawyers, or if you set up your own business and its successful. But engineering is become so diversified in terms of skills now. Certainly with technology enhancing our capabilities there is a world of opportunity to change our capabilities as engineers. With over £500bn of infrastructure projects in the pipeline, there's a lot of opportunity out there, however, you need to ensure the company you work for is willing to grow/change if you don't, you then get the Carillions of this world that fail because of chasing every contract without taking a step back to establish its own capability.
Not sure if that helps at all - but there you go a bit of a brain dump.
. The advantage of not being the boss 
