UKC

There is a job advertised on this site for a structural design engineer at the climbing wall manufacturer Enterprize in Kelbrook, Lancs (not far from where I live actually). Salary 23- 26k per annum with a list of skills requirements as long as your arm for a 39.5hr week.

I have been retired 9yrs now, after working for 46yrs in the engineering industry, and am amazed at the lowly salaries that companies still expect to pay for such skilled and demanding jobs,and can understand why people are not venturing into these types of industry these days. 

I guess they'll get what they pay for although it does seem a little concerning that this individual will be designing structures people climb on.

I think a lot of companies involved in the outdoors and in this case indoor climbing industry rely on/abuse peoples love of the 'lifestyle' to get away with paying lower wages.

It works out at about average for the whole country. (Whole economy, Office for National Statistics).

Not sure I see a cause for complaint there.

Bonkers. Like most of the salaries posted here for outdoor industry related jobs advertised on UKC. £23-26k is barely fresh graduate level pay for engineers, though you probably already know that.

Look up the ad and list of skills and experience required, hardly average!

Do you consider the job advertised as being average in regards qualifications and/or experience, etc.?
I wouldn't.

It's hard to measure a job's worth, especially in leisure associated industry.

I'm pretty sure you'd get a different set of responses outside a climbing forum.

Actually, having seen the job description now, they actually want a drawing office bod rather than a structural engineer. They also look like they are angling for an inexperienced grad, so is around the right pay, albeit for 2.5 hours a week too many!!

If they wanted a drawing office bod then why didn't they advertise the fact. I was a manufacturing/design draughtsman for most of my career. What interested me was the salary 25k which was about the same as I was on for just 37hrs/week when I retired 9yrs ago.  

Proving that since the recession hit, salaries have not really increased significantly, but prices have continually risen and were all a lot worse off these days. 

£23k in the north is a pretty good salary, many graduates wont see wages like that for decades in the labour market let alone after a couple year's experience. Working in an office designing climbing walls for £23k a year a stones throw from great climbing probably sounds like a slice of heaven to a lot of people. The amount of graduates has increased dramatically, engineering jobs haven't and thats got to an effect on starting salaries.

There is a theme of low pay in all aspects of the outdoors industry, not universally but when you look at the amount people are willing to pay for outdoor related services it just isn't enough to support good wages for people in many parts of the supply chain. How many threads on ukc do we get about the costs of going to a climbing wall? The costs of operation have shot up in the last ten years but prices haven't. It's probably more felt at the shop floor level than wall construction but you're not going to get the same wage designing climbing walls as you are designing luxury yachts, it still comes down to what the end user is willing to pay and there's unfortunately an abundance of customers who turn up in £50k cars and don't seem to see the irony in complaining about the cost of a £10 activity to someone who's most likely working below the minimum wage.

Yes, this.

I work a lot in the hills with foreign tourists. I am a qualified translator and fluent in French and Russian. The pay for guiding in a foreign language is the same as guiding in English, despite it being a rare skill. 

Next month I have agreed to be a coach tour guide in French. They want to do a couple of walks (conic hill, hidden valley etc) but largely I will just be sitting in a coach and talking about Scottish history etc in French. I won't have to drive the group or organise lunches etc (which I normally do), and I will be getting paid twice as much!

However, I don't expect to enjoy it as much as my normal guiding. So I guess we do accept lower pay for a job we love.

(About to get out of bed to take a Belgian family up Buchaille Etive Beag. Worth getting out of bed for I think!)

I don’t agree regarding graduate salaries in the North, yes they are lower than national averages, but not massively. Engineering is a reasonable performer in terms of graduate salaries. £26-30k isn’t unusual with some employers.

I’m an employer, we tend to employ graduates at approx £22k, but they will progress to £30k within a couple of years if they have anything about them. I don’t employ engineers, but other parts of the organisation do, on similar terms and can struggle to recruit.

I agree regarding lower salaries in the outdoor industry.

Surely climbing wall construction is an indoor industry?

From looking at the advert, it looks like a relatively junior support-function role, with the genuine engineering involved being at the lower end of the scale, and the salary matches that. Potentially packing boxes in the warehouse would be unlikely to be included in a more senior role description...

The salary they're offering is similar to that being offered for new-graduate engineering roles at manufacturing plants, without any shortage of candidates.

Considering the shortage of people with computer science skills and that engineering is easily a  transferable to this market, then companies taking on engineering graduates have to pay a reasonable salary. Your comments are a good benchmark and reasonable.I would certainly expect a competent engineering graduate in a good company easily to be on £30k plus within a couple of years.

And if they are time served and have done vocational degree,to be earning even more, as they are highly valued.

As you say the outdoor industry is a low pay industry, there is insufficent money in it, unless of course you are the owner of a big outdoor brand.

Here in Norway, engineering graduates start on around 45 - 55K gpb. and there's more climbing. phd students earn something similar, and get even more climbing in.

Does that include free beer( you need a high salary for beer costs).LOL.

€45,000-€55,000 for a graduate engineer starting out here in Germany, the weather is better and beer is dirt cheap😀

German speaking etc I assume with English....

A pretty useless stat, isn't it?

Useful to know until Halloween of course.

jk

Anything with the word "average" in it is. Doesn't stop people making a living out of juggling numbers, though,

Have to be careful with these figures. Unions have a big influence in Germany and have protection measures in place.

Otherwise people would have been jumping ship years ago if it was easy and attractive  .

My brother didn't struggle to find skilled work in Germany. Anecdotes aren't evidence of course but it's clearly not a closed shop.

jk

Expect that depends on the job or company, I know maybe half a dozen engineers and none of them work in German. In one of my climbing buddies companies the only German speaker is the guy who cuts the grass.

Structural Engineers don't earn much in the UK because practically nothing ever falls down.

Compare and contrast with IT consultants....

Yeah, but a litre of weissbier and four fat weisswurst every morning on your way to work tend to slow you down in the end

Just interested. Why Beag and not Mór? 

Fitness, time available, and I think the views from the south top are some of the best around.

I’m giving serious thought to packing in teaching here & jumping ship to Germany to work in forestry with a friend over there (Mosel region). I’m over there twice a year with work on trips, but my holiday there this summer really has convinced me it’s the way forward. I’ve just got to convince the wife now... 

British jobs for British workers is going to cut both ways....

I know, but hopefully it’ll be the Quittlings who suffer the most in the job market in the event of a recession. They’re the ones with (statistically and quite obviously by talking to them) few, if any, educational qualifications or transferable skills, and as very few of them can string together a coherent sentence in English, I’m guessing their chances of being able to talk any other languages is slim to none as well. 

There was an advert on here a while back for a senior Javascript dev which paid less than the graduate on my squad gets. I think I posted a whinge on here about it at the time. It was probably 50% of what I'd expect for that role here.

So what what you are saying is that they really want is a technician rather than an engineer? Why is there this trend these days to try and big up technicians by pretending that they are engineers?