Top 10 Highest Paid Engineers

When you look at the highest paying degrees, you wouldn’t have to look too hard to see engineering majors in the mix. Engineers are rewarded handsomely for their hard work. In this article, we’re talking about the highest paying engineering degrees and we will be focusing mainly on salary.

A common denominator you would find with all engineering careers is that they all fall into the “STEM” acronym for (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) category of careers. So as you look at these degrees and possibly studying them, you would combining all or some of these modules in college or university.

Also, it’s important to know most engineers have to get professional certification or accreditation before they can start plying their trade.

We have quite a lot of material to look at so let’s get started.

Highest Paying Engineering Degrees

#10. Nuclear Engineering

So what’s nuclear engineering all about? Nuclear engineering is about either breaking down or combining different atomic nuclei for energy production. With this degree you can expect to make around $73,000 a year in your first five years after graduating and then after 10 years also known as mid-career pay you’re going to be making around $124,000.

Now of course you could become a nuclear engineer and you’d be making around $113,000 a year. According to the BLS there’s 16,400 jobs available at the time writing and this will change with time but it is declining at negative 13% meaning in the next 10 years 2100 jobs are going to disappear.

Now the thing about any energy related career degree is that it’s not going to be very stable. It’s highly volatile because the energy sector in general is naturally that way. A war, the market dropping, regulations, laws changing and anything like that can disrupt your entire industry.

Now from my research most nuclear engineering jobs are actually relatively quite simple. You’re not going to be worked really hard. You don’t have to do super long hours or anything like that at least not usually.

How exciting or boring your job is going to be depends on where you’re working. You could be working at an electrical plant or work at other jobs. For instance you could work as a waste management expert and get rid of different nuclear waste.

You could get a job working with nuclear submarines where you’d be working on naval propulsion. You could also do a lot of research and development.

There are a lot of job opportunities out there besides working in the energy industry specifically and depending on what career path you go down you might end up going back and getting a master’s.

Overall unless you know exactly what you’re going for, exactly what career you want to get into and exactly how you need to get there I would recommend not going into this one that’s because of the negative job outlook given by the BLS.

#9. Computer Systems Engineering

Computer systems engineering is one the highest paying engineering degrees out there in college. Now this one is basically going to be kind of a combination of computer science, engineering and math skills of course and then a little bit of maybe information technology skills.

What do computer systems engineers do? They figure out how technology fits into the larger scheme of an organization or a business.

Now this one you can expect to make around $74,000 a year starting out and mid-career pay is a $124,000 a year.

There’s a ton of different career paths that you could go for with a computer systems engineering degree. Because you will be specializing in skill sets that are gonna be in the technology industry, there’s going to be a lot of different opportunities for you.

One career path you could definitely go for would be a computer systems analyst. They make around $90,000 a year. There’s 632,000 jobs available and it’s growing at 7% which is faster than average. And that means over the next 10 years there’s going to be 46,000 new jobs available.

You could also become a computer hardware engineer where they make around $117,000 a year. There’s 71,000 jobs available. This is quite a bit less and it’s growing at 2% which is slower than average. This means over the next 10 years there’s going to be about 1,100 jobs that pop up.

These tech degrees can be very confusing because all of them almost sound like the same thing. So let’s do a little comparison so you can get an idea of what you would be doing with one over the other.

If you were to get a computer science degree for instance you’d probably go into more information technology related jobs or software development software engineering related jobs. But as a computer systems engineer, you are going to be working with maybe some low-level software engineering and development, such as low-level programming but for the most part they’re going to be working with hardware.

Also with computer science you might go work at Google or Facebook and become a software engineer whereas with computer information systems you might work at Intel and design the next processor.

Overall this is a relatively rare majors. There’s not that many graduates that you can find all over the country. On top of that you could probably get into these same exact jobs or the same exact careers by getting a computer engineering degree and you’d have access to a lot of others as well.