Manufacturing Engineering Manager
Career Area: Engineering
Occupation Group: Engineering Managers
Salary
Percentile wages tell how much a certain percentage of an overall population in a geographic area or within a given industry or field makes. The percentile wage estimate is the value of a wage below which a certain percent of workers fall.
An example would be the 25th percentile, 25 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 75 percent earn more than the estimated wage value. At the 75th percentile, 75 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 25 percent earn more than the estimated wage value.
A typical Manufacturing Engineering Manager earns the following wages (national and state):
State
The average salary in North Carolina for those pursuing this career is $114,942
National
The average salary in the United States for those pursuing this career is $104,757
What Does a Professional in this Career Do?
Oversees engineering and technical design of manufacturing engineering projects, such as optimizing and maintaining production lines in a factory. Manages communication and coordination among different types of engineers working on a project. Supervises project schedule, budget, and communications with stakeholders.
Employment Trends
The job demand and job growth statistics shown here were derived from job posts over the past year. Expected job growth projections are extrapolated from year-over-year job post listing history.
Job demand and job growth is expected at the following rates:
| Location | Growth | |
|---|---|---|
| North Carolina | 6 | +5.1% |
| Nationwide | 349 | +2.8% |
Skills
A professional in this position typically utilizes the following skills in the course of everyday work in this exciting and challenging field:
Baseline Skills
The following are baseline skills every Manufacturing Engineering Manager is expected to have in order to experience success in this field:
- Teamwork / Collaboration: Experience working in collaborative efforts with a team to achieve a common goal or to complete a task in the most effective and efficient way.
- Problem Solving: Problem solving consists of using generic or ad hoc methods, in an orderly manner, for finding solutions to problems.
- Communication Skills: The ability to convey information to another effectively and efficiently.
- Organizational Skills: Experience with a systematic process of structuring, integrating, co-ordinating task goals, and activities to resources in order to attain objectives.
- Planning: Working experience with the process of thinking about and organizing the activities required to achieve desired goals.
Specialized Skills
These skills are specific to working in this career:
- Engineering Management: Experience organizing, administering, and planning the operational performance of complex engineering driven enterprises.
- Software Engineering: Working experience with the application of engineering to the development of software in a systematic method.
- Product Management: Product management is an organizational lifecycle function within a company dealing with the planning, forecasting, and production, or marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle.
- Quality Assurance and Control: Working experience with processes used to measure and assure the quality of a product and ensuring products and services meet consumer expectations.
- DevOps: Working experience of DevOps. DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization's ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.
Distinguishing Skills
Any Manufacturing Engineering Manager that possesses the following skills will stand out against the competition:
- Kubernetes: Working experience of Kubernetes. Kubernetes (commonly referred to as K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications that was originally designed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It aims to provide a platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts.
- Predictive / Preventative Maintenance: Working experience of Predictive / Preventative Maintenance. The idea behind preventive maintenance (PM) is that by performing regular maintenance on equipment, you lessen the chances of that equipment failing. It's the same idea as taking your car in for regular oil changes to preempt a total breakdown.
- Production Management: Working experience of Production Management. Production Management refers to the application of management principles to the production function in a factory. In other words, production management involves application of planning, organizing, directing and controlling the production process.
- Engineering Projects: Project Engineering bridges the boundaries between engineering and project management, leading the technical workers who contribute to the building of structures or products.
- Reliability Engineering Studies: Working experience of Reliability Engineering Studies, which is a sub-discipline of systems engineering that emphasizes dependability in the lifecycle management of a product. Dependability, or reliability, describes the ability of a system or component to function under stated conditions for a specified period of time. Reliability is closely related to availability, which is typically described as the ability of a component or system to function at a specified moment or interval of time.
Salary Boosting Skills
A professional who wishes to excel in this career path may consider developing the following highly valued skills:
- Engineering Activities: Working experience of Engineering Activities, which includes all activities or functions of an engineer, invloving the application of science and mathematics to the design, manufacture or maintenance of complex products.
- Chef Infrastructure Automation: Working experience with Chef, which is a configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang. It uses a pure-Ruby, domain-specific language (DSL) for writing system configuration recipes. Chef is used to streamline the task of configuring and maintaining a companys servers, and can integrate with cloud-based platforms such as Internap, Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, OpenStack, SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace to automatically provision and configure new machines.
- Kubernetes: Working experience of Kubernetes. Kubernetes (commonly referred to as K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications that was originally designed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It aims to provide a platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts.
- Agile Development: Working experience of Agile Development, which is an umbrella term for a set of methods and practices based on the values and principles expressed in the Agile Manifesto. Solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams utilizing the appropriate practices for their context.
- Design for Manufacture/Design for Assembly (DFM/DFA): Design for manufacturability (also sometimes known as design for manufacturing or DFM) is the general engineering practice of designing products in such a way that they are easy to manufacture.
Experience
This position typically requires the following level of experience. The numbers presented in the pie charts below were derived from actual job posts over the past year. Not all job postings list experience requirements.
| Experience Required | % |
| 0 to 2 years | 1% |
| 3 to 5 years | 47% |
| 6 to 8 years | 19% |
Many of the programs offered through NC State are designed for working professionals who need additional credentials to enhance existing work experience.
Students who do not have the expected level of experience may wish to look into internship and employment opportunities.
Common Job Titles
It is possible to find work in this field in positions commonly listed as the following job titles:
- Manager, Production Engineering Support
- Production Engineering Manager
- Manager, Production Engineering
- Director, Production Engineering
- Remote - Production Engineering Manager
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