My Nonlinear Way to $95k as a 27-Year-Old Mechanical Engineer in Chicagoland

My Nonlinear Way to $95k as a 27-Year-Old Mechanical Engineer in Chicagoland

Salary Steps #1
This is the kickoff of Salary Steps! Salary Steps is a series based on the principle of salary transparency. My hope with this series is to interview professionals from my network with varied backgrounds to elucidate their paths to earning what they deserve and doing what they love. Feel free to reach out if you or anyone you know would like to be interviewed anonymously for a later edition of Salary Steps!

Me:
I am a 27-year-old Mechanical Engineer working about 15 miles from downtown Chicago and I earn a salary of $95,000/year. I am about 6 years into my career and have held 5 different full-time roles at 4 different companies.

My Role:
I currently work as a Mechanical Engineer III on the Reliability Engineering team within the Dry Gas Seals product family at John Crane. John Crane is a global leader in industrial sealing technology for major industries such as Oil and Gas, Food and Beverage, and Chemical and Pharmaceutical. The company is a subsidiary of Smiths Group plc, a diversified engineering organization headquartered in London, England.

My role is largely based on failure analysis, investigation, and root cause analysis. I am called upon in the case of gas seal performance issues or catastrophic failures seen on our customers’ machines, in our end users’ applications, and even sometimes in our internal testing procedures. I leverage my understanding of Dry Gas Seals technology alongside my team of experts to identify why things went wrong and how those issues can be prevented in the future.

My day-to-day function includes facing with customers onsite at our facility to disassemble and inspect gas seals, managing internal stakeholders in the execution of subsequent analyses like contamination reviews or dimensional checks, and drafting thorough Failure Analysis Reports. Depending on the day or week, I may apply my skills of project management, FEA, CAD, RCA, DFMA, and/or more to solve problems and deliver value to John Crane customers.

My Salary Steps:
$64,800 – $67,068/year: Manufacturing Engineer (July 2018 – December 2019)
I took my first Salary Steps after graduating from Northwestern University in 2018 by joining Parker Hannifin Corporation, a Fortune 500 motion control technology company. I worked as a Manufacturing Engineer for their Hydraulic Cartridge Systems division of products. My function included designing tools, implementing new manufacturing technologies, managing projects, and resolving manufacturing line issues.

$70,020/year: Design Engineer (January 2020 – January 2021)
My next Salary Step came from an internal promotion at Parker Hannifin. I stepped into an open role on the Design Engineering team. There I leveraged the hydraulics knowledge I had developed on the Manufacturing side to design hydraulic valves through the use of CAD, simulation, and testing.

$74,000/year: Hardware Engineer (January 2021 – March 2022)
After some 2.5 years at Parker Hannifin, I took my next Salary Step at a small Additive Manufacturing startup called Azul 3D, Inc. I joined as the 15th hire and immediately began contributing to mechanical prototype development for their resin-based 3D printing technology platform. I utilized skills in CAD, DFMA, process definition, and project management to contribute to the launch of the LAKE, the world’s first commercial HARP (High Area Rapid Printing) 3D printer.

$90,000/year: Product Analyst (March 2022 – October 2022)
About a year into my role at Azul 3D, I was reached out to by a recruiter from Kearney, Inc. This globally renowned management consulting firm was where I took my next Salary Step, and largest to date. I join Kearney’s Product Excellence and Renewal Lab (PERL) to advise clients on their product development efforts. Here I straddled the line between engineer and consultant to guide clients’ efforts, leveraging skills in Excel, PowerPoint, DFMA, cost reduction, and process optimization along the way.

$95,000/year: Mechanical Engineer III (October 2022 – Present)
After my exploratory experience at Kearney, I rejoined a more traditional engineering role at John Crane, now with a broadened perspective on business and customer facing that would prove invaluable in my new position.

My Why:
My career progression to this point has certainly been nonlinear. I have sidestepped, pivoted, and backtracked my way to progress. All the while, though, my goal has been simply to continue growing my knowledge base. I have used my early career to explore a variety of Mechanical Engineering alternative paths, gathering skills that have translated into a resume ripe with hard and soft skills. While unusual, my path has certainly been intentional.

My career goals include technical leadership, and I strongly believe that the best leaders are those that develop their team members’ talents based on those members’ goals. How can I expect to insightfully steer the careers of my direct reports in the future if I haven’t diversified my own set of experiences? Each one of my Salary Steps has brought me closer to my vision of becoming the great leader I aspire to be. The additional income is just a bonus.

Written by Kanan R Wanha