I spoke to some of the young chemical engineers where I work, with quite a lot of them having started between 12 - 18 months ago. With a B.Eng you start with ±400k p/a, with M.Eng you start with ±450k p/a and with a Ph.D you start with ±450k p/a + car allowance of R6600 p/m.
-
Join the MyBroadband community
South Africa’s biggest forum. Discuss, discover, and connect with thousands of members.
-
Question of the Day: How do you normally pay for purchases in stores?
Starting Salary for 1st Year Engineer
- Thread starter Suspect99
- Start date
Azbubu
Honorary Master
No, you don't . There's no standard starting salary, as evidenced in this thread.
Last edited:
Suspect99
Executive Member
For grad programmes, most companies offer around R300k pa CTC according to my classmates. I'm not sure about consulting firms.
I'm happy with mine. 330k pa CTC. 8 hours a day 5 days a week. no overtime needed. plenty of leave
I saw the other thread about accountants and it got me curious
What should the starting salary be for a engineer (Bsc or BEng only:)?
This is straight out of varsity after 4 years.
Let me get it started.
I started with about 17.5k after deductions and after a year am at about 20.5k after deductions. (Big parastatal company)
Is there anybody willing to devulge any details?
Graduated in 2008 with an Electrical Engineering degree.
Went straight into banking IT as a business analyst at R270k per annum CTC (in 2009).
I now earn around the R560k mark CTC (a couple generous increases and a move between banks hiking up the salary), excluding bonuses.
Last edited:
What I mean is that at the company I work, that is the starting salary of a chemical engineer straight out of university.CharmaineB
Active Member
- Joined
- Mar 3, 2013
- Messages
- 74
- Reaction score
- 0
My husband started working in January this year. He has a master's degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. He is also busy with his PhD part time, and has been working on that for 3 years already (I mention this because I'm not sure if it might have influenced his salary). His salary is R350k CTC per annum.
unlikely that an unobtained degree will influence his salary.
It looks like R250k cost to company per annum seems like a good start for engineers - less than that and you're on the left of the bell curve (judging by this thread)
IndusEngZA
Member
I'll be the first to admit that Industrial Engineering is not as "hard" as Chemical or Mechanical engineering. And there are still a lot of people who don't actually understand what Industrial Engineers do. The truth is we are more "jack of all trade" style engineers, and can do a very very wide variety of jobs but there are extremely few jobs available in the few areas that IndEng are specialists in, like simulation modelling or operations research. The rest of what we do is just logic work or management work.
Engineers from other disciplines can easily adapt to do what we do. But it is much harder for me to suddenly take on the job of a Mech Eng or Chem Eng without going back to varsity to study first. In the end though, Engineering is pretty much 85% paperwork, more so in some fields than others.
I have no problem with Chem or Mech Engs earning way higher than I do. Especially Chem. That **** is crazy.
IndusEngZA
Member
I think our developers are decently valued, at least. Most of them are contractors though and worth every cent we spend on them. The in-house devs are also good and seem to get decent salaries/increases. And I can't say what increases were like in other departments. There seems to be a general air of unhappiness though, but since it's super confidential, nobody is allowed to actually say what they got. Meanwhile the company posts brilliant financial result after brilliant financial result.
Yes, it is very sad that IT departments are considered cost centres instead of profit centres when your work is critical in helping the rest of the business bring in money. Analysts, especially, seem to not really "do" much until you work on a project with me and see the amount of necessary work we put in to ensure that stuff is done right the first time and we don't waste time and money fixing things later.
IndusEngZA
Member
Well the company tries to justify the poor increases by pointing out that I got a 33% increase in salary from my internship year to my permanent position. True, I went from 15k to 20k (33%) but to then essentially stay at 20k for 3 years is pathetic.
Considering inflation, they are paying me LESS monetary-value-wise than when I started working for them. They also tell me that the increases are all on the same scale company-wide.
If you got an "average" performance review, you can get an increase between 0% - B%, at your managers' discretion. for a "good" review you can get between A% - C%, at your managers' discretion. For an excellent review (which is extremely hard to attain) you can get between C% - E%, at your managers' discretion. Sadly, E% is the max increase you can get, and for the past 2 years, E = 5%.
I would move, but my current job offers some really amazing other perks that still make it a great place to work despite the below-average financial compensation. I am trying to find another company to work for that would be as great a workplace while at the same time trying to figure out what on earth I want to actually do with my Engineering degree, since I spent the last 3 years working as an Analyst instead of an Engineer. I do know I don't want to be an Analyst the rest of my life.
IndusEngZA
Member
Posts like yours make me cry. How did you go straight to an analyst job out of varsity? ALL the places I tried insisted that I had to first go through their Graduate program, including the banks.
That being said, I have heard that the banks pay well. I just wish it wasn't a bank. I don't do formal corporate. Business clothing? No way. My company is Cape-Town style informal. Winter jeans & takkies, Summer boardshorts and flipflops. Show me a bank that will let me wear flipflops to the office and I'm there like a bear.
I think if you lucky as an electrical & computer engineer you get about 18-24k ctc/month and that use to be the standard universities post for honors level degrees.
But that's not the real value. eg. In Cape Town anything related to development starts off at 8-12k irrespective of degree unless you with a large multi-national. Telecoms you looking at 10-15k ctc as an intern.
With respect to me.. Had the tough rough end of the stick earning 8k at 1st perma job(gave in just to have something to do) and that haunts you because the IT industry basis salary jumps entirely on current more that capability(serious! so I often find myself doing a lot more than peers which I don't mind as I am extremely well skilled) .
2ndly profit models are based on cheap skilled to semi skilled resources basically used at a 70k/month industry cost. So aside from getting job done on time(or well within time allotted) resource cost is kept down as much as possible.
Kinda why I dislike the industry but telecoms vendors have suffered since 2008 and unless you had a lot of experience at that point/2008 you risked it all.
But that's not the real value. eg. In Cape Town anything related to development starts off at 8-12k irrespective of degree unless you with a large multi-national. Telecoms you looking at 10-15k ctc as an intern.
With respect to me.. Had the tough rough end of the stick earning 8k at 1st perma job(gave in just to have something to do) and that haunts you because the IT industry basis salary jumps entirely on current more that capability(serious! so I often find myself doing a lot more than peers which I don't mind as I am extremely well skilled) .
2ndly profit models are based on cheap skilled to semi skilled resources basically used at a 70k/month industry cost. So aside from getting job done on time(or well within time allotted) resource cost is kept down as much as possible.
Kinda why I dislike the industry but telecoms vendors have suffered since 2008 and unless you had a lot of experience at that point/2008 you risked it all.
Suspect99
Executive Member
I'm in Durban
Unhappy1
Honorary Master
- Joined
- May 25, 2011
- Messages
- 28,881
- Reaction score
- 21,804
Yes and your figure was also lower than some of the others floating around here.
Worked there part time as a developer while studying, then moved over to a BA position after graduating.
I'd say most places take junior BAs without experience
P
Picard
Guest
I know I'm over-simplifying things a bit but if you could continue with your reasoning ... I'm interested to know where Civil engineering and Electrical/electronic engineering rank in terms of difficulty.
Would you place in this order for example: Industrial - Civil - Mechanical - E/E - Chemical??
Yeah, I'd agree if your list goes from least to most difficult
konfab
Honorary Master
Well most people would rank their field as the most difficult
I don't like the idea of ranking as the field are usually quite broad. With E&E,you can go from computational electromagnetics (witchcraft level of difficulty) to programming a microcontroller (relatively simple).
If you really want a rank, I guess you could use the level of maths required in each field. For that:
E&E/Chemical/Mechanical all have a similar level of mathematical ability required.
Next comes civil
Then industrial.
However that is not the whole story, engineering is not just about being able to do maths, you have certain problems that are encountered. Problems such as who is building your creation. In this aspect, Chemical, Mechanical and E&E have it relatively easy, you can give your design to a bunch of trained technicians to build it. With civil, you might have to rely on someone who is barely off the street. So your design has to be simple enough for a construction worker to build.