Electrical Engineering Salary and Insights for 2025

Electrical engineering includes all aspects of electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism; it’s a huge field, and it incorporates practically every imaginable aspect of the electromagnetic spectrum, from individual devices to systems. The subfields are too numerous to mention but include power engineering, signal processing, electronics, telecommunications, and radio-frequency engineering. This calls for a great deal of both theory and experiment, and there are countless opportunities to make discoveries at the point where fundamentals and practical applications converge in the electrical sciences.

Let’s look at the software side. In electrical engineering, you find a range of tools, each for individual jobs:

LabVIEW: despite complaints about its user interface and bugs that are hard to track, is widely used in industry (legacy), yet they think differently and code differently. Uses a weird programming language (actually they use a graphical programming language to control everything) that not everyone likes to code in, but if you need it, you can include C code (as a way around LabVIEW native limitations).

Altium and KiCad: These are two great choices for printed circuit board (PCB) design and needed to create schematics (layouts of an electronic circuit) for anything that fits onto a board.

LTSpice: A simulation software for electronic circuits. Often used to check specifications and help electronic engineers predict how a circuit will behave before it is made and tested.

Realterm: Typically used for serial port interfacing which is essential for debugging and development, especially for communications.

Integrated development environments (IDEs) for Microcontrollers: IDEs provide programmers with the ability to program, compile, and test firmware written for microcontrollers.

Python: Great for just about every kind of engineering because it’s both flexible and easy to use.

MATLAB: For ensuring signal integrity and all sorts of engineering tasks: complex maths and system simulation.

ADS (Advanced Design System): You haven’t worked with this if you haven’t worked with high-powered microwave and RF engineering.

Linux: While this might sound just for self-selecting nerds, an understanding of Linux (an alternative to Microsoft Windows) is an underrated skill set that can be valuable when it comes to emerging markets, especially in highly distributed businesses where stability and customization is a key requirement.

Vim: Favourite among a certain class of engineers as a good text editor for coding and scripting.

SPICE: Fundamental to circuit simulation, working SPICE knowledge is essential for any electrical engineer.

C and Git: You need to know C programming (depending on the industry) and Git or a similar version control system to manage multiple revisions of code collaboratively.