Electrical Engineer

What the work actually is

Electrical engineering splits into families that share a foundation and then diverge hard. O*NET’s task statements for the occupation describe designing and maintaining electrical equipment and systems, overseeing project timelines and budgets, directing manufacturing and installation, performing calculations to manufacturing standards, operating engineering software, testing vendors’ products, inspecting installations for compliance, and preparing technical drawings and documentation.

In practice you will end up in one of these, and the choice is usually made by which courses you enjoyed:

• Power and energy — generation, transmission, distribution, grid modernisation, renewables. ⚠ This is where the PE licence genuinely matters, and where Florida’s utilities hire.
• Electronics and circuits — analogue and digital design, semiconductors, instrumentation.
• Embedded and computer engineering — microprocessors, FPGAs, firmware. Overlaps heavily with computer engineering.
• Signals, communications and control — wireless, radar, signal processing, control systems. Strong demand from Florida’s defence and simulation sector.
• Electromagnetics and photonics — antennas, RF, optics.

Projected need

O*NET, drawing on federal projections, reports 192,000 electrical engineers employed (2024), growth projected “much faster than average” (7% or higher) through 2034, and about 11,700 openings a year. Median pay is $120,630 a year ($58.00 an hour), 2025 figures — among the higher medians in engineering. 82% of survey respondents reported a bachelor’s degree as the requirement for new hires, a notably firmer figure than for mechanical engineering.

⚠ Those are national numbers. Florida’s demand is concentrated: space launch and aerospace on the Space Coast, defence and simulation around Orlando, utilities and grid work statewide, semiconductors, and medical devices.

Necessary skills

• Mathematics you can use, not just pass. Differential equations and linear algebra are not background here — circuits, signals and control are written in them. Complex numbers become routine arithmetic.
• Comfort with abstraction. ⚠ This is the honest difference from mechanical engineering: you cannot see a field, a phasor or a transfer function. Students who need to picture the mechanism sometimes find the transition to signals and electromagnetics hard, and it is worth knowing that before year three.
• Laboratory and instrumentation skill — oscilloscope, function generator, spectrum analyser — and the habit of measuring rather than assuming.
• Programming. Nearly every branch now needs C for embedded work and Python or MATLAB for analysis.
• Debugging temperament. A great deal of the job is finding why a circuit that should work does not.

⚠⚠ Electrical engineering, computer engineering, or engineering technology?

Three nearby degrees, and the differences are consequential:

⚠ The technology route also uses its own mathematics sequence, which frequently does not satisfy the calculus requirement for an engineering degree — so transferring into engineering later can mean repeating mathematics on top of the extra two years. All three are real careers; only the first two are engineering for licensure purposes.

Advice

• Check ABET accreditation and the commission at amspub.abet.org before you enrol. An Engineering accreditation is what gives the four-year route.
• Treat Physics II as a major course. Electricity and magnetism is the direct foundation of circuits, electronics and electromagnetics — more so here than in any other engineering discipline. Do not treat it as a general-education box.
• Get to a circuits course early and see whether you like it. It is the cheapest honest test of whether this discipline suits you.
• Build something outside coursework. A microcontroller project, a robot, amateur radio, a competition team. Employers ask, and it is the most common differentiator between graduates with identical transcripts.
• Sit the FE in your final year even if you expect to go into electronics. Options are cheap to keep and expensive to recreate.
• If you are starting at a state college, follow the published engineering transfer track and confirm the receiving university’s exact course numbers in writing — engineering has little elective slack, so a mis-substituted course costs a term.