Salary and Opinion Survey 2002

Salary and Opinion Survey 2002

Margaret Quan Senior Editor, Times People

This could only be called a rare year both for EEs and the industry. Salaries rose an amazing $6,200, or 7.4 percent above 2001 levels, in the United States, but the prolonged industry downturn and the sluggish national economy bore into almost every other aspect of professional life.

In 2002 bonuses got cut and salaries frozen, layoffs ran rampant and engineers' stocks continued to lose value.

Among U.S. respondents to the EE Times "2002 Worldwide Salary & Opinion Survey," 401 said they experienced unemployment for some period this year. That's almost 7 percent of the 5,915 readers who answered this question, but the number might be skewed: Many of the jobless might not have had the opportunity to take the survey if they were eliminated from EE Times subscription lists as they left their employers.

American EEs are pessimistic about the industry's prospects for recovery, the state of the nation's economy, the stock market and corporate layoffs, and they are demoralized about working with downsized engineering groups and tighter budgets. And readers are anxious about the future of U.S. engineering jobs that they fear may be migrating overseas, where labor costs are lower.

The bad news prompts us to wonder just how the industry is going to find its way back.

This year's survey takes a global perspective, in a tradition that we began last year, thanks to help from sister publications EE Times U.K. and EE Times Asia. Each of those newspapers conducted its own surveys in parallel with the U.S. effort. We also thank Nikkei Electronics magazine for providing data from 1,200 of its Japanese subscribers.

As in 2001, all of the material in this issue as well as further coverage will be posted on TheWorkCircuit.com, our career community site, where you can also access discussion boards unique to the Web.

As for the methodology, this year's response was overwhelming, with 5,967 readers taking part in the U.S. survey-512 on paper and 5,455 on the Web-between June 17 and July 12. The large number of responses was stimulated, at least in part, by an e-mail campaign.

Even with nearly 6,000 respondents, however, the results were almost identical to last year's, when we surveyed just 500 readers. Thus, this year's survey proved the case that a sample size of 1,000 readers is statistically reliable. We estimate that our results have a confidence interval of plus/minus 1.3.

Electronic Engineering Times U.K. surveyed 1,218 respondents, 329 on the Web and 889 on paper, between mid-July and late August. EE Times Asia, for its part, queried 1,257 readers via Web surveys in several countries including mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Singapore, South Korea and the rest of Asia.

Together the results provide a broad picture of the trials and triumphs of engineers across the globe in 2002. We hope the story we tell a year from now is a happier one.