How do the top 5 engineering professions pay?

Choosing a profession that you will excel at and enjoy can be a nerve wracking and exhausting decision.  When you consider the cost of going to college sometimes it pays to do your homework on what is paying the most. For those of you keen on being engineers, here are the top paying engineering professions of 2015.   

5.) Network Architect: A Network Architect is part of the electrical engineering discipline of science. The job description includes designing and building networks including LAN’s and WAN’s. While planning and designing these networks you will also need to predict how traffic growth will affect it later on. Most of the time architects are planning but some do find their way out into the field to supervise engineers. The road to this point can take a few years of working with other IT systems first but it’s worth it. The median salary is $115,000!   

4.) Sales Director : This job position requires a Bachelors in Engineering or related field as you will need a technical background to understand what you’re selling. Sales directors are expected to have excellent intrapersonal skills as well. What you would be selling depends entirely on the company and its range of products but it’s safe to say that it wouldn’t be boring. Your sales scope would fall between anything scientific or technological service or product-wise. The growth for this position between 2012 and 2022 is expected to be as much as 9%, which is great news for college grads. Oh, here’s the really great news: median salary for a Sales Director is $125,000 a year!  

3.) VP of Construction Management Operations : Most individuals in this field hold a Civil Engineering degree. Your regular responsibilities would include not only overseeing the day to day operations but also the financial well-being of various current projects. You would also be responsible for writing contracts and managing the designs of various projects. I would be lying to you if I said this was something you could jump into right after college but that’s not the case. Due to the amount of experience required to manage such a huge scope of projects, typically 10 years of experience is required. The good news is there one hell of a payoff in the form of a $134,000 median pay.   

1 Tied.) VP of Business Development : There are plenty of different degrees that business development VP’s hold but the most popular are Engineering degrees. Which is sort of the running theme here. What the heck is business development you might be asking yourself? Business Development is delicate combination of networking and creation of value for the organization through various markets. Ultimately, you are responsible for the growth of your company. You can expect to be rewarded for your troubles though because the median salary is $151,000.  

1 Tied.) Chief IT Architect: Tied for first with VP of Business Development is the esteemed position of Chief IT Architect. Most individuals hold an Electrical Engineering degree and the median pay is a stellar $151,000. IT Architects are responsible for infrastructure design and solving integration problems across multiple frameworks. A knowledge of data management, network service delivery, security, and storage are required for this role.  

*Salaries sourced from BusinessInsider.com