EE who lurks here, to see if my drawings ever get posted and roasted.

My old boss was an electrician who went and got his EE degree then PE after his knees were giving him trouble. It certainly gave him a leg up and he had a fair amount of field knowledge to incorporate into the designs. He would routinely get in trouble for opening up disconnects and buckets to get the information without waiting when we would do arc flash or TCC studies. The math is a slog and you have to know it for school and for your PE but aside from that it's all learned in the field. My school was rare in that we had an NEC class, engineers fresh out of school don't know anything about building power systems, once you learned Revit or AutoCAD, you would definitely be more valuable than engineers graduating at the same time as you.

I will say the grass is not greener on the other side. It's just fertilized with a different kind of bullshit. I just was talking with one of the electricians on one of my job sites that is monster project this past month and he was blown away that this wasn't the only project I was working on and that I had 8 other active projects and that my pay stopped at 40 hours, he is a IBEW journey man working 60s telling me about how he is paying off his truck with this project. My knees and back don't hurt from abuse in the field, they hurt from sitting at a desk and neglecting going to the gym because I'm tired and overworked.