Also called: Maintenance & Reliability Engineer, Asset Reliability Engineer
Uses data to predict when factory machines will break and stops failures before they happen.
You pull up a dashboard showing temperature and vibration data from 400 motors and pumps, and spot one bearing heating up. You schedule a fix during the weekend shutdown instead of letting it fail on Monday and stop the whole plant. Then you dig into why the same gearbox keeps dying and redesign the maintenance plan.
Estimated from industry salary surveys; BLS groups this under industrial/mechanical engineers.
Approximate: anchored on Bureau of Labor Statistics data for a broader job group.
Bachelor's degree (4-year), about 4 years after high school. Bachelor's in mechanical, electrical or industrial engineering; CMRP certification is common.
Ways in: 4-year college, Certification. Training cost: $15k – $60k.
Majors to look at: Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Electrical Engineering.
Growing faster than average. No separate BLS projection; strong demand as plants adopt predictive maintenance.
Medium risk for 10 years. AI predictive-maintenance platforms now do much of the failure forecasting; engineers still decide fixes and lead teams.
Classes: AP Statistics, AP Physics, AP Calculus.
Career Universe is an early version. Pay, training and AI-risk figures are estimates to start your own research, not verified facts. The research was written with AI research assistants, checked by validation scripts and spot-checked by hand. Check anything important with schools, employers and official sources. How the numbers work.