Employment
 According
to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, electrical and electronics engineers hold about
291,000 jobs in the U.S.
This represents 19.4% of the 1.5 million jobs held by engineers in the
U.S.
Almost every industry has a need to employ electrical engineers.
Click here to learn about employment of
electrical engineers by industry sector.
 Primary
Job Functions
There
are hundreds of job titles which employers use to describe the job
functions and responsibilities relating to electrical and electronics
engineering. It is taken for granted that EE's draw heavily from
mathematics. Industry job titles are not necessarily consistent from one
employer to the next. Job titles often reflect a particular discipline or
industry; for example, computer engineers, aerospace engineers, control
systems engineers, and bioengineers. Titles also refer to the basic
functions that engineers perform, such as research, design, testing and
evaluation, manufacturing and applications, maintenance and field service.
Often employers refer to a specific technical specialization or
technology, such as, "Software and Signal Processing Engineers for IBM /
Microelectronics," to describe the kind of engineer wanted. Some engineers
have titles that are associated with other functions, such as management,
human resources, sales and law. A good way to ascertain commonly used job
titles is to scan company web sites and employment ads placed in
newspapers and other publications.
Industries
 According to a survey of IEEE Spectrum readers, employment
of EEs and computer scientists is concentrated in a small number of
Fortune 1000 companies. 37 percent worked in computer or electronics
firms. Of those, two thirds worked at 64 large computer / electronics
firms. The rest worked for 503 smaller companies. One of six Spectrum
readers was employed in the utilities industry. A smaller percentage were
employed in professional service providers, aerospace companies,
diversified-service companies, government, universities, and other
sectors. Although these figures are instructive for EEs, the employment
breakdown of computer professionals, many of them who are not EEs, is more
widely distributed in all industry sectors. Find out more about
EE Industries.
Note: Most resources in this section are provided by
IEEE and the US Department
of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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