Jon Excell

Based on fieldwork carried out from January to mid-March 2026 this year’s survey - which  attracted 652 responses from professionals working across 12 sectors - highlights slow but steady salary growth, stable job satisfaction levels, and a continued appetite among engineers to explore new opportunities both within and beyond their current sectors.

There is a version of the relationship between industry and academia that belongs firmly to the past. In that version, the university is the ivory tower - a place of patient, curiosity-driven research, unconcerned with commercial timelines, indifferent to market demands. Industry, meanwhile, operates in a parallel universe: faster, harder-edged, focused on the bottom line. The two cultures occasionally make contact, usually when a company has a problem it cannot solve in-house.