Highest paying engineering jobs in Germany

Hello,
My name is chad, Im from Ohio joined the U.S. Army and got stationed in Germany. And ever since, have been fascinated by it. I plan to move there as soon as I learn the language completely. Anyway my questions are: does Germany have job opportunities for Environmental Engineer's? I know they are a very Environmental friendly country, but do not know if this job exists in Germany. If so what does it pay or if you can refer me to a website ( in English or German)
with more information on this that would be great! Also, what are some high-paying job in Germany? I do not want to be a millionaire, but would like to own a house with some land and so forth. And my last question is what is the highest paying engineering job in Germany? I know these questions can't in anyway be exact since a lot depends on the company, but a real numbers estimate is what I'm looking for.

Thank you for your time,
Chad Alpaugh

Hello Chad,

Mark Twain said:
It takes a week to learn English.
It takes a month to learn French.
And German will take the rest of your life.

Yes, there are opportunities for Enviromental Engineers (google for "Ingenieur Umweltschutz").
Starting salary would be approx. 40t€
Highest paying engineering jobs in Germany are those which also contain the word "business".
Try to translate "Ingenieure sind die Kamele, auf denen die Kaufleute reiten".
However, since your English will always be better than your German, a German company most probably would send you as their representative to the States.
If you want to know how much houses cost in Germany, check www.immobilienscout24.de

engineers are the camels, on something the something ride... eh my vocabulary isnt that great. alright and yes i googled a lot... but didnt come up with much. what are some generally high paying jobs in Germany then? what about dentistry?

You'll never get rich on anything with the word environmental in the job title.

Good luck... I still remember, 15 years ago, the eureka moment standing on an S-bahn platform when I first understood what 'bitte zuruck bleiben' meant. I can talk German relatively well now but oh so much more to do!

As for highest paid engineering jobs - Generally engineers in Germany are fairly well paid and respected, especially when compared to the UK where my 'engineering' job, degree, and years of experience get confused with the 'engineer' who comes to repair the washing machine. It's not a job for life though, and there's stiff competition as several companies have laid off thousands of engineers recently. What you earn in Germany is traditionally based on your level of education which seems ridiculous to most of us but that's the way it is. Some companies, especially the foreign ones, are a bit more enlightened but don't expect to walk in to Siemens with a basic school education (even if you have 20 years experience in industry) and be taken seriously.

Good luck.

My German is going really well though, it will be a year since i started learning german in about a month and my reading German is good speaking good but understanding is slow I need the interaction I believe to get that down. and since im learning it on my own in Iraq...not a lot of interaction here. but anyway... So the more school you have the better. gotcha. does anyone know about denistry in germany? or where i could find out more about it? how much they get paid, and so forth. because I was thinking of having my major in engineering then go to dentistry school.

Dentist - more earning potential than engineer I would say. So would my ex-fiance the dentist with his stupid house in austria and fat BMW. Idiot.

Studying engineering (German electrical engineers I know normally took seven years to get their Masters, i.e., Diplom) and then trying to study dentistry afterwards will look very nutty to people here. Get your language skills down pat and then think about pursuing one course of study, and from the areas of interest you have, it will be very tough. Dentistry may be subject to admissions quotas, and another thing to remember with regards to any academic discipline is that they have a 13th grade here, so unless you have at least 30 college credits (including calculus) or whatever they evaluate as being equal to their Abitur, as it is called, you will end up having to take a year's worth of prepatory classes just to get accepted once you pass the relevant language exam.

Personally, I think you may be in grave danger of biting off more than you can chew. Here's an alternate idea: look at the University of London's external program- depending on how much longer you will be in the military, you could have a bachelor's degree that must officially be recognized throughout the EU and can then proceed to a Masters program in Germany if you so choose.

www.londonexternal.ac.uk

Just so you know, there is a shortage, the thousands, of engineers in Germany (according to my Engineering friends at the TUM). In that case, engineers are pretty well paid and recruited often.

what to study here? Your dental degree from a German Uni is NOT recognized in North America. And Vise Versa! You need about another 2 years of schooling before you can write the exam.


depends if they are kasse doc or not. If they take kasse, cut the earning in half. I think the earning power are about the same for both professions.

Sticking "Ingenieur" and "Umwelt" into monster.de brings up 72 pages of job offers. The very first one is actually an Umweltingenieur. Your only problem will be convincing people what level your qualifications are, but if you aim for something that is Techniker/Ingenieru level you shoudl ahve no problems. Make sure you know what ISO14001 is before you start.

> Also, what are some high-paying job in Germany?

CEO of a bank
Head of Porsche
Rockstar
Dieter Bohlen

> I do not want to be a millionaire, but would like to own a house with some land and so forth.

House yes, land probably not, for the simple reason that wherever there is land that you can afford there wont be any engineering jobs. I could buy a huge(ish) house with plenty of land up where my wife comes form, the nearest job opportunity would be Hamburg, over an hour by motorway away. Germanys pretty crowded, there really not a huge amount of land left anywhere you would really want to live.

>And my last question is what is the highest paying engineering job in Germany?

No way of telling. If you actually work as an engineer youll be looking at something like 40-80kEuros. Beyond that youre looking at positions with less enigineeringa nd more management.

A guess...but like the UK & US, I imagine that chemical engineers are very well paid here to keep with the world market rates otherwise they'd lose them abroad. Chemical engineer graduates have the highest starting salary of any engineering graduates. I know a friend of a friend who has a doctorate in chemical engineering, he works 6 months of the year on short contracts and earns around £80,000, the other 6 months he Snowboards in Europe and North America! The short contracts he works are very intense 70-80hrs week though. He worked in the US for 2yrs on around $150,000 a year, buts that the reward for 5yrs studying and passing a hard degree plus 10yrs experience.

Nobody works 80 hrs week. It's not allowed even in Germany.

If you say so.


How German of you.

.. 10 years experience! 150000$ . I buy that.
Otherwise, starting salary for chemical engineers in the range of 4400€ per month.
No 80 hrs allowed in Germany? What about doctors in hospitals?
Also consultants are very well paid. ..above 4400€ ..but 60 to 80 hrs per week!

What nonsense are you talking ? Doctors in hospitals have "Bereitschaftsdienst" (to be on call / in readiness) but it is not 80 hours. It means that they need to be available if they're needed but it does not mean that they really work 80 hrs per week. Nobody works in Germany 80 hrs week. NOBODY!

Here's a ranking published by the newspaper "Die Welt" of Top paying jobs, which needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It is based on the data given by a rather random set of people in the listed professions. The monthly incomes are before taxes and for people in their 1st to 5th year without executive function.

Take for example the first in the list: chemist – perhaps those who land jobs in development and research are well paid, but AFAIK without a doctoral degree prospects are not great.

The 3rd and 4th ranking, mechanical an electrical engineers are in high demand right now, but engineers are on the other hand the standard example of an out-of-phase relation between supply and demand ("Schweinezyklus" in German). In 6 years there might be a surplus of engineer graduates.

Doctors in hospitals aren't really well paid unless they are Chefarzt, considering their work hours and responsibility; doctors with their own practice and mainly private patients might do well.

And so on, there are no guaranties. Plus, as others have pointed out, there is the issue of recognition in the respective other country (especially with non-academic trainings, but also studies). The Bachelor has only been introduced in Germany a few years ago, along with the EU-wide so-called Bologna process towards transferability.

Perhaps asking "what are my interests and talents?" would be less misleading in the long run?

I worked 80 hour weeks. Granted not every week, but sometimes for a month or so and the experience certainly proved it's not good for your health. It was for a small startup company that rewarded us well and treated us fairly on balance and working those hours was a pleasure. In the end the company was successful - and then got bought by Infineon . Given the choice of our beamter life now or the startup I'd go for the startup any day.

Quatsch. Although 80 is relatively rare, it is done and 60-70 hours is fairly commonplace.

80 hours is unlikely, but there are exceptions for specific job classifications. Most of them that I can think of require that you get more days off, so like work 7 days, have 3 off or so...

edited because i just can't be bothered pointing out how full of shit kylie is anymore.

my other half works 80 hour weeks when the job demands. so do his colleagues...they are paid hourly.

Im going to introduce you to some very tired-looking friends of mine, all doctors working in clinics in and around Nuremberg who will carefully explain to you the difference between theory and practice. They will tell you that although it is called "Bereitschaftsdienst" and although it is intended to allow you to sleep, more often than not just being in the hospital means you are working, not least because public-funded hospitals are already understaffed and are having staff cut further. That often means 24-36 hours per shift. They easily hit 80 hours a week and more.

Do you watch Grays anatomy? The bits where they all fight about which operations they can do is true. If your boss doesnt like you, you dont get to operate on the good days and dont learn. One friend of mines boss sleeps max 4 hrs a day and expects his subordinates to do the same. If you dont - Youre out. No, its not legal, but no-one yet cares enough to challenge change it effectively. If they did try and keep doctors to 40 hour weeks (or even 50 hrs) they would realise that they need at least 100% more doctors.

andy M

My (admittedly limited) experience of chemical engineers suggests that if you are a chemical engineer you are on the dole. The German chemical industry seems to see a PHD as the lowest entry level, whereby as I understand it a Dr.Chem. is an academically lower qualification compared to a Dr. Ing (cue howls of protest from Dr.Chems)

andy M

I hit 60hrs pretty frequently in a bog-standard engineering management job.

andy M

I would agree with this, my company is a supplier to the chem industry in Germany and the market is pretty much in the toilet. Also in Germany there are very thick glass ceilings if you do not have the correct qualifications, and a PhD is pretty much entry level for a career in Chem/chem Eng... I'm not sure about the Dr Chem vs Dr Ing, but my german colleagues agree with you.. they are both Dr. Ing.


so do I, also in mid-upper business management

Whether Dr.-Ing. or Dr. rer. nat. as is the correct title in natural sciences just sais whether one has done his PhD in engineering or natural sciences. The academic qualification is the same.

I understand it would look nutty, but what i was trying to say was you have to have a bachelors degree(engineering) to go to dental school(4yrs). and correct me if im mistaken, it doesnt matter what its in.

You're mistaken - dentistry isn't like law, where you can come in and do a crossover course. To do dentistry, you go Bachelor's, Postgrad, CPD

http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/details/Default.aspx?Id=610

Although, I too am more than happy to be corrected. Carm?

i stand corrected thanks for the info bob.

Did it get bought by some dodgy American companies first???

The academic qualification is the same, but the amount of work and particularly the amount or original research you have to do to get the qualification varies quite wildly, I am told.

andy "not yet even MBA (but wait ill November)" M

Is that a normal entry salary for a chem (or any other branch of eng.)eng.? (I mean straight out of college)


These consultants...they would be people considered experts or could they also be new beginners in the field?

Yes, when I wrote starting salary I meant beginners.
In a "Finance" threat I found a post by paulwork

Industry and salary links (in German)
http://www.gehaltsvergleich.com

And yes, consulting companies hire people directly from the university.
Look at the homepages of McKinsey, Arthur D. Little etc.
A link for salaries: http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/jobundber...,536566,00.html