Product Design Engineer

Career Area: Design, Media, and Writing

Occupation Group: Product Design

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 Product Design Engineer earns the following wages (national and state):

State

The average salary in North Carolina for those pursuing this career is $88,555

National

The average salary in the United States for those pursuing this career is $91,097

What Does a Professional in this Career Do?

Responsible for the complete production of a product from original idea through to fully functioning product. May be responsible for engineering of materials and manufacturing the product. May be responsible for graphic design, ergonomics and aesthetics of the product.

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:

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 Product Design Engineer is expected to have in order to experience success in this field:

• Communication Skills: The ability to convey information to another effectively and efficiently.
• 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.
• Creativity: Mental characteristic that allows a person to think outside of the box, which results in innovative or different approaches to a particular task.
• Research: Experience performing creative and systematic work to understand a product, market, or customer, either before building a new solution, or to troubleshoot an existing issue

Specialized Skills

These skills are specific to working in this career:

• Product Design: Product design as a verb is to create a new product to be sold by a business to its customers.
• Product Development: In business and engineering, new product development (NPD) covers the complete process of bringing a new product to market.
• Mechanical Engineering: Mechanical Engineering, is the discipline that applies engineering, physics, and materials science principles to design, analyze, manufacture, and maintain mechanical systems.
• Project Management: Project management is the discipline of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria.
• SolidWorks: Working experience of SolidWorks, which is a solid modeler, and utilizes a parametric feature-based approach which was initially developed by PTC (Creo/Pro-Engineer) to create models and assemblies. The software is written on Parasolid-kernel.

Distinguishing Skills

Any Product Design Engineer that possesses the following skills will stand out against the competition:

• Failure Analysis: Failure analysis is the process of collecting and analyzing data to determine the cause of a failure, often with the goal of determining corrective actions or liability.
• Catia V5: Working experience of Catia V5, which is a 3D software solution that can be used to design large products for manufactures, such as planes, boats, submarines, and automobiles.
• Automotive Engineering: Working experience of Automotive Engineering. Automotive engineering, along with aerospace engineering and marine engineering, is a branch of vehicle engineering, incorporating elements of mechanical, electrical, electronic, software and safety engineering as applied to the design, manufacture and operation of motorcycles, automobiles and trucks and their respective engineering subsystems.
• Computer Aided Drafting/Design (CAD): Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computer systems (or workstations) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design.
• Mechanical Design: Mechanical Design or Machine Design is the branch of Engineering Design. Machine design or Mechanical Design can lead to the formation of the entirely new machine or it can lead to improvement of the existing machine.

Salary Boosting Skills

A professional who wishes to excel in this career path may consider developing the following highly valued skills:

• Automotive Engineering: Working experience of Automotive Engineering. Automotive engineering, along with aerospace engineering and marine engineering, is a branch of vehicle engineering, incorporating elements of mechanical, electrical, electronic, software and safety engineering as applied to the design, manufacture and operation of motorcycles, automobiles and trucks and their respective engineering subsystems.

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.

Common Job Titles

It is possible to find work in this field in positions commonly listed as the following job titles:

• Product Design Engineer
• Senior Product Engineer
• Senior Product Design Engineer
• Product Designer II
• Product Engineer II

Similar Occupations

If you are interested in exploring similar occupations, you may want to research the following job titles:

• Product Development Engineer
• Manufacturing Product Design Engineer
• Automotive Product Design Engineer
• Mechanical Product Design Engineer
• Product Designer