Recently, I wrote an article about all the ins and outs of being a robotics technician. While writing that article, I started to wonder just how much other professions, like industrial engineers, earn. So I did some research and found interesting results!

Expedition 36 industrial engineer Chris Cassidy of NASA works on the Capillary Flow Experiment aboard the International Space Station on May 22. Source: NASA

My initial Google search came up with a wide variety of results. There are a lot of factors at play when trying to figure out the average salary for any career. Entry-level, intermediate and senior industrial engineer salaries are all different. According to Salary.com, an entry-level industrial engineer’s average salary is $65,171 a year. For an intermediate industrial engineer, the average salary is $77,279 a year. A senior industrial engineer's average salary is $94,311 a year.

The results vary on many career websites. According to Glassdoor the national average for an industrial engineer is $73,959. But then according to Payscale.com, an industrial engineer’s median salary is $65,055. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of May 2016, the median salary is $84,310. Clearly, the salary ranges depend on which website you look at.

Another factor to take into consideration is the location of the job. According to Glassdoor, the average salary for an industrial engineer in New York City is $78,360. But an industrial engineer in Dallas, Texas makes $71,306 on average. The average salary in Los Angeles, Calif. is $79,724. The salary of an industrial engineer is dependent on where the worker lives, which rings true for most careers.

There are a lot of factors to take into consideration when looking into how much a job is going to pay. As a recent college grad, I know the obsession with how much you could potentially get paid. One thing I learned through spending plenty of time obsessing over the salary sites, is to take every single one of the “average” salaries with a grain of salt. These are just averages. Each company is different; they all have different goals and set amount of money allocated for each department. An average is just that, an average. Your potential salary could be a bit more or a bit less. That being said, it's helpful to have a general understanding of what other similarly qualified workers in your field earn, so when you do receive a job offer you will know if you are being undersold.