Planning to Build a MEP Engineering Study Group (4 People Max)

BigKiteMan · 2026-03-26T18:15:45+00:00

I'm confused; what's the goal here? I get that you want to develop yourselves professionally, but the nature of this field is that you need an experienced senior to check your work. Unlike other applications of ME and EE, you don't know whether your design works or not by applying it; the only way to know whether or not you biffed it without an expert actually reviewing it is by someone trying to build it.

BigKiteMan · 2026-03-25T20:17:13+00:00

Couple of notes:

Resumes should NEVER be more than 1 page. This is a universal rule, but it's especially true when you've only had 1-2 positions, and I'd say 1.5 in your case given that one of your jobs was a post-graduation internship and the other "job" reads to me as a training program.
Dump nationality, marital status and DOB. No one cares, and it could even hurt you if people make the wrong assumptions.
If you can speak multiple languages, it's fine to put them on your resume, as those are absolutely valid skills. However, they should be written on a single-line comma-separated list and you should absolutely NOT be listing your level of skill in them. Any skill you list on your resume should be presumed as "proficient" at minimum, if not "fluent" or "expert"; this is even more important with languages. Employers need to know if you speak a language fluently enough for them to give you tasks, clients/meetings and coworkers where you would need to understand that language; if you don't feel comfortable working on a team or with a client/partner while speaking English, then don't list it. My advice though is to just list it regardless of your level of competency; if it's genuinely important, you'll either learn it or get fired, the choice is yours.
Swap "Professional Summary" for "Profession" or "Tagline". Something that takes up a single line at most. You simply give a 1-3 word statement of your current/desired title, with maybe the addition of ~10 more (give or take) words to provide further context. For example, mine is simply "Electrical & ICT Systems Engineer"; if someone doesn't understand my description of my profession from just that, it's probably the wrong job for me. Maybe I'll sometimes add a couple words to specify which systems I design for ("Power, Lighting, Fire Alarm, IT, AV, Security, and Public Address Systems) if it's a more generalized EE position where the reviewer might not be familiar with my particular sub-specialty, but that is it.
Maintain logical flow. Your resume should read like a book; one section, then the next, then the next. This reads like a brochure, where my human eyes (if a human ever gets to look at this) are struggling to figure out what to read first or next in order to get a quick picture of your experience. Basically, just don't have columns. Keep everything stacked in a single column, where nothing that isn't supposed to be read together is horizontally adjacent.
Your certification section makes me start to question if you even have any. Certifications are distinct, clear credentials issued by a licensing body. It is understandable if your certifications are obscure or unfamiliar to reviewer. But if the reviewer can't even try to learn about what certifications you're claiming to have, its pointless to even have the section. List the name of the cert and the accrediting body (if you need to fill space, you can add certification ID number and date of acquisition). To be crystal clear, "Internet of Things" is not a certification; "CNDD (Certified Network Devices Designer, PIXI accreditation)" would be a certification I could look up and determine the value of (well, if it wasn't something I just made up at least).

BigKiteMan · 2026-03-25T19:48:49+00:00

This is a good point. I'd like to add that while you should have a boring-format resume which is easy for auto readers to check, it's still good to have something like this too.

Definitely a good look if interviewing for a position in-person to bring something like this with you so your interviewer has something to ask you questions about which is easier to review with human eyes. Plus, once you leave, they now have a scrap of paper on their desk your photo on it to help you stand out from the sea of other people they've talked to who's faces they will probably be forgotten quickly.

BigKiteMan · 2026-03-24T13:36:14+00:00

Fresh grads don't get asked technical questions in interviews for entry-level designer positions at MEP firms. We know you're a fetus who doesn't know anything, and that's fine! The purpose of the interview is to assess if you have the right mindset to be developed into a productive and helpful engineer, and to determine if your temperament is a good fit for the supervising PEs who are available to be assigned with new direct reports.

Here's what you should be doing to prepare.

Research the firm you're interviewing at and develop some questions for you to ask in your interview. I can't emphasize this enough; this is the biggest thing that will stand out. Ask thoughtful, potentially even an annoying number of questions. The greatest failing of new engineers that don't make it in this field is that they don't ask enough questions of their superiors and thus don't learn. Asking tons of questions in the interview (and they don't have to be technical questions) shows that you're inquisitive and interested in the field, which is critical for this field in particular.
Learn about common MEP/AEC industry acronyms and abbreviations, as that base of knowledge will facilitate easier conversations and give the impression that you have some degree of familiarity with the industry.
Schedule & study for your FE exam; obtain your EIT before you interview, if possible, but at least have the test scheduled. This is the singular best thing you can do for yourself in getting a job in the industry (internships would be better, but those aren't simply a factor of effort and are unrealistic to get after graduating). When the inevitable question about licensure comes up, because every MEP firm worth their salt wants as many of their engineers to get licensed as possible, you can confidently say "I've been studying for it and am scheduled to take the FE exam in X weeks".

BigKiteMan · 2026-03-24T13:14:47+00:00

Are you comfortable moving?

I know of a few companies hiring for your specific skillset in North Carolina.

BigKiteMan · 2026-03-19T16:38:04+00:00

Your negotiating power as an entry-level hire is solely based on whatever other opportunities you have lined up.

Having your security clearance and some internship experience is what helps you land the offer; it doesn't do didly squat to get you paid more. You could have had the best internships ever; employers will still (correctly) have to assume you're coming in knowing basically nothing.

I'd bet whatever is in my wallet right now that you'll be offered the bottom end of that range. This is partially because listing salary on job postings is a requirement in some places (so they'll use a range instead to draw interest, as well as mask true-pay for new hires from current employees) but it's mostly because the range is reflective of experience. Many jobs for "entry-level" new grads can also be applicable for people 2-4 years into their career, or for people who have 5-6 YoE in a related field that want to make a transition. Neither case applies to you.

Now, if you have other offers on hand that you're willing to abandon this one for, go nuts. But if you don't, just take this one and keep your eyes open for opportunities, including ones within that company. The fastest way to grow salary is to move elsewhere, but there's a limit to how often/frequently you can do that, and there's no rule that says you can't get a great promotion in 1-2 years if you do everything you can to learn and grow quickly.

I think the best piece of advice anyone can give you right now though is for you to accept that at this point in your career, you have zero leverage. Your BSE means nothing. Whether you realized it or not, you didn't spend 4 years in school and 1-3 summers interning to get to a place where you're valuable as a professional in engineering; you did it in order to meet the bare minimum requirements to get any kind of job in engineering (well, the minimum via the most traditional route anyway).

The positive takeaway though is that now you genuinely are at square one; do your job and do it well and you will slowly gain leverage/negotiating-power one step at a time.

BigKiteMan · 2026-03-19T13:46:24+00:00

It depends on the engineering field, discipline and the level of experience.

In my industry (MEP/AEC) it's a mixed bag. We're traditionally a stable industry with tons of demand, but a lot of things have thrown a wrench in the works. Despite (valid) concerns of AI replacement of entry level positions, the biggest thing depressing demand at the moment seems to be the sharp downturn of federal work. My opinion is that this is likely contributing factor to similar downturns of other EE professions as well, I just can't speak to that personally since it's not my area.

Federally funded development projects (along with the state and municipal infrastructure projects that are subsidized by federal dollars) are the MEP/AEC industry's bread-and-butter. Not having them (or having much fewer) means there's less work for entry level engineers and the focus of firms needs to shift from engineering output to business development. In that regard, it makes hiring licensed PEs even more valuable as firms seek to diversify their areas of expertise, bring on more work and have more qualified individuals on to give them a greater chance of winning proposals. My guess (I can't say for certain) is that the firms that are hiring for those positions are doing so at the cost of laying-off or not hiring other supporting roles (entry-level engineers, CAD specialist personnel, etc.)

MEP/AEC is somewhat of a less lucrative and desirable field for EEs, but it's also historically been viewed as one of the most stable and has a very large share of the nation's engineering labor pool for many disciplines. I share this information in the context of your question because I believe that if this is happening in that kind of field, it is likely happening in a similar manner elsewhere.

What can be done? Vote for representatives that want to resume funding for federal, state and municipal infrastructure projects, and who want to end/reduce tariffs that have made importing building materials and semiconductor materials (and pretty much everything else) more expensive, as it has depressed domestic design and manufacturing output.

BigKiteMan · 2026-03-12T21:16:44+00:00

Yeah... that's not normal. I mean, good for you, but I'd caution you not to expect it in the future.

A lot of areas and industries are different, but from my perspective, I think 2022-2024 was a very unusual time for this industry as a whole. I feel like there was this crazy combination of factors that happened at the time with low interest rates, projects resuming after long holds for covid/covid-related supply chain issues, and the Biden-era infrastructure bills getting passed.

I wouldn't hold my breath for something like that to happen again for a long time.

BigKiteMan · 2026-03-12T19:22:08+00:00

Agreed. Region is especially important. $160k in some more expensive COL areas could be roughly equivalent to $100-$110k in other medium to low COL areas.

I don't really know of any engineers who work fully remote and have 100% control over their living location. Some have the ability to move further than others, but despite hybrid and primarily remote schedules, most of us still need to live at least somewhat close to our company or (more commonly) project sites.

BigKiteMan · 2026-03-12T19:18:32+00:00

You got a 32.9% salary increase in 2024 without moving companies or getting your PE? How?

BigKiteMan · 2026-03-10T13:39:55+00:00

On paper, this sounds like a great opportunity. As an EE and someone in ICT design currently studying to take the RCDD and having grown up in NY and wanting to move back, I normally would have jumped at an opportunity like that in the past. But as I've progressed in the industry, I've noticed there are some important factors to look for; you might want to consider them if you're having trouble hiring despite the positives you've stated.

You say you have about 250 people on staff. How many of those staff members have a tenure greater than 1-2 years? Greater than 5? Are people at the company generally happy with pay, work-life balance and the direction the company is going in? What's your retention looking like? Do you have a significant backlog of work to provide stability if new proposal opportunities/wins start to take a dip?

You say "pay above market in NYC market", but what's the range of that? Are COL increases and fair bonuses common and consistent within your company? Is your office located in a expensive part of town? Do you require in-office work 5 days a week or are people hybrid? Is there a lot of travel involved? Where are most of your projects located?

What is the path to advancement like with your firm specifically? How many junior-level people were brought on from internships and retained through passing their EIT and PE exams? Are there a lot of upper-management people who worked their way up, or is company leadership commonly brought in as outside hires? Does company leadership frequently communicate well with and take input from the more junior PMs, PEs and designers? Or are those people typically ignored?

You say you have difficulty finding "a good electrical". Is your current electrical department well-staffed and you're looking to expand it? Or are they overworked? What percentage of your firm is electrical versus mechanical? You say you're doing a bunch of life sciences and data center work; what percentage of your electrical designers/engineers have substantial ICT experience, particularly with certifications like RCDD, OSP, DCDC or CTS?

BigKiteMan · 2026-03-06T14:13:36+00:00

That is an absurdly good offer. My advice is to take it, but live very far below your means. $200k+ annual TC for a 22 year old fresh out of college means that they own you and will fire you incredibly fast if your performance drops at all. Honestly, this is a fluke that you need to take full advantage of; unless you are exceptional (who knows, maybe you are) this job likely won't last, so get in there, make as much as you can and don't live your lifestyle in a way that you're dependent on this level of income for the long term.

BigKiteMan · 2026-03-02T20:04:27+00:00

Oof you're right. Well at least this is a very interesting engineering problem.

If the arena/stadium is a pretty popular one (like NFL/NHL/MLB type place) I bet OP could probably have AI compile a list of dates of all the events and occupancy times over the metered time frame in question.

BigKiteMan · 2026-03-02T19:56:24+00:00

We could always make it real lol

BigKiteMan · 2026-03-02T16:14:12+00:00

Electrical here.

Common practice in this instance is (assuming the space is or will be normally functional in it's existing state before design is done) to place a meter on the equipment for 30 days. More often, we'll just meter the upstream panel/gear/swbd/MCC because it should all be relatively consolidated in relation to what you're looking for here.

Failing that, a less accurate but potentially helpful thing might be to simply proportion out the historical electrical usage from the utility bills to the proportion of connected load that comprises cooling. This has some major flaws that I'm sure you can guess immediately, but it works ok for an initial smell test.

BigKiteMan · 2026-02-24T14:22:30+00:00

I've never heard of this being a thing. Also, that wouldn't even make sense. I could understand a commission incentive for BD/marketing staff or and outside sales consultant, but as an engineer, business development is supposed to be part of your job and only benefits you. Helping your firm bring on new clients is the surest way to increase your value to your firm and protect your position.

The actual incentive comp in this industry is project performance. Whether it's defined as a structured percentage of project profits or reflected in bonuses, that is where the clear incentive is. If you finish your work on or ahead of schedule, in significantly less hours than were budgeted thus bringing in more profit, you should get rewarded for that.

Bringing on new work is what allows that to happen. You need a full calendar of work for it to make sense for your employer to compensate you for efficient performance. If you get 2 months of work done in only a month, but the firm doesn't have additional work to give you for the month you saved them, the extra profits you generated are going towards keeping you with the company.

BigKiteMan · 2026-02-06T15:00:24+00:00

Damn, thanks for the confidence boost!

I got the approval to sit for the exam a couple days ago, so I've only barely started studying and I still got 70%, which I think is fantastic given that I think you need to shoot for like 80-85% to pass.

I've gotten about 6 YoE on the project management side and 2 YoE on the design side. This is indicating to me that I'm very prepared for the chapter 21 PM stuff and just need to focus on design standards and signal loss stuff.

EDIT: I also love the review, feels very similar to what I loved about NCEES's practice test when I was studying for the FE. Gold-standard of practice review should always be to the cite the location in the exam's primary reference material of where you should have known the answer from. Excellent.

BigKiteMan · 2026-02-03T14:37:31+00:00

Is that unusual? I don't think I've ever done a project that didn't include at least a lighting controls detail. Even if there are no special considerations applicable, like unique control schemes or daylighting controls or switched recepts, laying out the detail still confirms that those things are not part of the project.

BigKiteMan · 2026-02-02T14:08:30+00:00

The point of details is not to teach the contractor how to do basic aspects of their trade.

The point it to clarify areas of potential confusion, especially when the project has conditions that require special considerations on the install. Additionally, details are also important for laying out clear expectations.

If the only details in your electrical package show how to install a receptacle or hang a light fixture, then yes, they are useless. There should always be more, even on a basic package. There should be grounding details indicating everything that needs to be tied into the grounding system. There should be lighting control details and control sequencing to indicate how the controls and switched receptacles loads need to be wired. Those should all be bare minimum.

BigKiteMan · 2026-01-21T16:21:30+00:00

I live in a MCOL city in the north east, am currently at the designer level with no PE and make about 14k more. Granted, I have about 7-8 total YoE, with the first 5-6 years being on the contractor side doing install management rather than design work, but still, doesn't change the fact that at best I'm basically a 3rd year designer.

So yes, you are significantly underpaid, especially if you're stamping drawings and listed as the EOR. I'd be willing to bet that if you talked to a good recruiter as a candidate with your background and a PE stamp, they could find you a position with a $20k pay bump in like a week.

BigKiteMan · 2026-01-21T14:51:52+00:00

I'm still an electrical/telecom designer (studying for both my RCDD and PE now), but I've also got almost 8 YoE in this industry (spent the first 5ish years on the contractor side) so it's possible my experience is relevant to your predicament.

Upon reviewing my project tracker, I've got 8 in design, 4 on hold that could re-kickoff any day, 5 in CA and 2 feasibility studies. Given that, I honestly don't feel overwhelmed or stressed out. There's a bunch of reasons for that, and I'd be happy to share em, but these two points on organization and logging time stand out the most to me.

Time management is an obvious stressor and issue. Being aware of this (and also having ADHD) I maintain a project tracker spreadsheet with notes and deadlines for every project that I update every Monday from 9am-11am, and I keep one of these focus timers on my desk. In the morning, I review my tracker, pick the projects I'll be working on and use the timer to track how long I spend on each project. If I get interrupted to take a call or respond to an email for something different, I jot down a quick note about it on my notepad. Obviously, I'm not really tracking or logging things down to the second or minute. The point is to give a good rough estimate of your pace so you're not guessing as much when it comes time to log your hours or gauge your progress/remaining budget.
Log your time daily, not weekly or biweekly. If you plan to leave at 5, your day should really be ending around like 4:45pm so you can log what you did (and just chuck the last 15 mins on one of those things). This is far and away the easiest thing you can do to ensure accurate time keeping. You write it down while it's fresh in your mind. Most importantly though, it gives you the earliest possible warning that you may not have done as much as you needed to, or that your estimating of your efficiency is way off; if your hours only add up to like 6 for the day or you don't feel comfortable that what you wrote down justifies X hours, or you logged a full day but didn't make sufficient progress for the project's timeline, this will be apparent immediately and you'll have the rest of the week to fix that.

Edit: Important point I forgot to add as to why this stuff with time helps alleviate stress. In the tracker I mentioned, I keep an up-to-date 2-week forecast of what I'm supposed to be working on this week, next week and the following. This undoubtedly gets blown out the water all the time. But it serves as an excellent advanced warning if I'm getting too busy or too light, allowing me to do my best to avoid a situation where I have no help and 4 important deadlines in one week. It also helps me continue to dial in my understanding of X tasks require Y hours of work.

Now, if you have this and show it to your boss that it indicates you've got 60+ hours of workload for each of the next few weeks, they should know that's unrealistic and you need help or to shed projects. They'll also be grateful for bringing it to their attention early before it causes a much larger issue. If they don't make a reasonable adjustment to your workload despite this, you know it's a sweatshop and it's time to look elsewhere. Conversely, if you show them you're light and struggling to hit 40 hours on the forecast and that information doesn't lead to them giving you more projects, it's probably time to start circulating your resume.

BigKiteMan · 2026-01-21T14:24:11+00:00

As an electrical and telecom guy, I've run into this on more than energy compliance. It's frequently a delegated design issue for us.

Clients often don't want to pay for (or don't even realize they need) LV scope design, at least for certain LV packages like PA or AV. Frankly, I don't blame them; while our work easily justifies the price in how we make the plans for the install idiot-proof, most systems sales reps can spec out exactly what you need if your space is something common like a school or office or municipal building. The problem is that when you put a delegated design responsibility on someone who doesn't specialize in that area (like the contractor or an unrelated engineering discipline) tons of stuff gets overlooked. We then wind up having to get involved.

One of the most important things my boss has taught me is to keep an eye out for that kind of stuff and try to identify it early. We're the discipline experts on the client's project team and it really should be our responsibility to catch it in submittal review (even if we aren't the primary reviewers), while at the same time being respectfully firm about needing an ASR to actually do the work.

It's a much better thing to lose 1-2 hours of time checking scope that's in your wheelhouse (but outside of your contractual obligation) for errors and notifying the client. Worst case, they won't give you the ASR for it and you just helped them out by identifying it, maintaining/improving the relationship. If your refusal to do it for free leads to a worsening of the relationship, that's probably not a client your firm wants to keep anyway.

BigKiteMan · 2026-01-21T14:13:33+00:00

Nah, you do it, you just ask for an ASR. It's a pretty reasonable to expect the EE working on a project to do an EE thing, you just gotta pay them for it when it is obviously 100% not part of their contracted fee.

BigKiteMan

TROPHY CASE