What is the future of being an RF engineer?

RF Technician Jobs :
RF engineers have some scope in telecom vendors like Nokia Networks, Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE, Alcatel- Lucent and Idea Cellular (Idea manage its own networks rest outsource). Even these companies hire only few engineers for RF planning work and outsources field work (RF testing in the field) to small vendors. Also RF engineers job is low paid job when you start as a drive test engineer which involved your 24/7 hrs of work efforts and its become even more challenging because RF engineers workload increase more in extreme whether condition. Even after working for many years as a RF engineers there is very few scope for your career growth as this works doesn't add any value in you.

Radio-frequency (RF) engineering is not the type of career that has a high attrition rate. But if the profession is as good as it sounds, why are companies having such a difficult time finding RF engineers to fill their vacant positions?

There are two main reasons. The first is due to the basic supply and demand rule. The wireless communications field has grown steadily in recent years, much like the software and computer engineering fields.

Because the demand for software engineers has been so great, and the profession has a reputation of paying extremely high salaries, many engineering students have focused on this field.

"Most students in electrical engineering have been attracted by computer engineering," says Edward Jull. He's an electrical engineering professor.

"The present demand for radio-frequency engineers is also a result of the growth of wireless communications and the development of integrated circuits and computers."

The other reason there seems to be a shortage of RF engineers is that courses in RF are often hard to find in many universities.

"It's quite difficult to find a direct path to RF," says Lorna Carr. She is a senior RF engineer.

She says that when she was attending university, there were extremely few courses available in RF. Upon graduation, she says she was offered a position with a company where she was exposed to the skills required by an RF engineer.

She then took it upon herself to learn the rest of the skills needed to get involved with the RF side of engineering. "I was pretty much self-taught," admits Carr. "I would read for an hour to an hour and a half each morning before work."