Reliability Engineer

Career Area: Engineering

Occupation Group: Mechanical and Related Engineers

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 Reliability Engineer earns the following wages (national and state):

State

The average salary in North Carolina for those pursuing this career is $77,381

National

The average salary in the United States for those pursuing this career is $81,689

What Does a Professional in this Career Do?

Evaluates and analyzes the reliability of manufacturing and production equipment and processes. Identifies pro-active maintenance requirements and process improvements. Works to maximize reliable performance and prevent equipment or process failures.

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

• 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.
• Microsoft Office: Microsoft Office is an office suite of applications, servers, and services developed by Microsoft.
• Microsoft Excel: Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications.
• 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:

• Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA): Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA)also failure modes, plural, in many publicationswas one of the first highly structured, systematic techniques for failure analysis.
• 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.
• Quality Management: Working experience of Quality Management. Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service is consistent. It has four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product and service quality, but also on the means to achieve it. Quality management, therefore, uses quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality.
• Production Part Approval Process (PPAP): Working experience of the Production Part Approval Process (PPAP), which is a valuable tool for establishing confidence in component suppliers and their production processes.
• Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP): Working experience of Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP), which is a framework of procedures and techniques used to develop products in industry, particularly the automotive industry. It is quite similar to the concept of Design for Six Sigma (DFSS).

Distinguishing Skills

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

• Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM): A coordinate measuring machine (CMM) is a device for measuring the physical geometrical characteristics of an object.
• 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.
• Design of experiments (DOE): The design of experiments (DOE, DOX, or experimental design) is the design of any task that aims to describe or explain the variation of information under conditions that are hypothesized to reflect the variation.
• Product Improvement: Product Improvement is a cross-functional effort between the Engineering, Manufacturing, Quality and Marketing teams to monitor product quality/yield/cost and then identify, prioritize and implement ongoing product improvement activities.
• Gauge Repeatability and Reproducibility (Gauge R&R): ANOVA gauge R&R measures the amount of variability induced in measurements by the measurement system itself, and compares it to the total variability observed to determine the viability of the measurement system. There are two important aspects of a Gauge R&R:

Salary Boosting Skills

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

• 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.

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:

• Quality Engineer
• Senior Quality Engineer
• Validation Engineer
• Quality Engineer II
• Quality Senior Engineer I

Similar Occupations

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

• Quality Validation Engineer
• Product Quality Engineer
• Process Quality Engineer