Electrical Engineering is a broad and creative profession concerned with the design, development, planning and management of systems and devices which underpin modern economies and contribute to the quality of life.

An Electrical Engineer may be responsible for research, design, development, manufacturing and management of complex hardware and software systems and reliable cost effective devices, many involving the use of new information and computer intensive technologies. These include:

Computer systems, data and telecommunication networks including the Internet; Mobile telecommunications and wireless networks Optical and microwave communications; Integrated electronic systems Advanced robotics and intelligent machines Television and image processing systems Generation and transmission of electric power; Renewable energy systems and solar energy conversion; Biomedical instruments and applications, such as medical imaging scanners, the cochlear implant (bionic ear), pacemakers and hearing aids;

Career Opportunities

Graduates in Electrical Engineering should have no difficulty in finding employment, particularly in areas where rapid changes in technology are occurring. Salaries for new graduates are as high as for other prestige profession, but increasing significantly within the first five years. Successful and very experienced graduates can earn salary package in excess of $100,000 per annum and some may start up their own companies.

Potential employers include:

	Service industries such as Telstra, Optus, AAPT and electricity authorities
	Large private industrial groups, such as Ericcson, Alstrom, BHP, Boeing Australia, Honeywell, Motorola, IBM, and Alcatel.
	Small innovative private firms specializing in the application of new technologies to new products and services, in a range of areas such as telecommunications and wireless electronics, internet services, biomedical instrumentation etc.

What is Telecommunications Engineering?

Telecommunications Engineering is concerned with communicating information at a distance. It is strongly associated with data communications, largely because of the tendency to encode, compress and encrypt all information, and because of the growing importance of digital and wireless (e.g. mobile telephony) networks.

Telecommunications Engineers design, develop, test and maintain Telecommunications systems. Telecommunications Engineering will appeal to those who are interested in the following fields:

	Satellite communications
	Signal and image processing
	Optical fibres and photonics;
	Mobile satellite communications;
	Data networks;
	Data coding, compression, encryption and transmission;
	Software systems including e-commerce;
	Microelectronic devices and systems
	Real-time embedded systems.

Career Opportunities

Telecommunications Engineering is the most rapidly developing and dynamic field of Engineering. Salaries for new graduates are as high as for other prestige profession, but will increase significantly within the first five years, while very experienced graduates can earn salary package in excess of $100,000 per annum.

Potential employers include

	Major service providers such as; Telstra, Optus and AAPT
	Large private industrial groups such as; Motorola, Alcatel, Ericsson, Nokia
	A host of smaller service and technology providers, some of them highly specialized and technologically sophisticated.

:The demand for graduates in telecommunications is rapidly increasing as the technology advances and broadens its scope of applications.

What is Photonic Engineering?

Photonics is about generating, manipulating (processing) and detecting light (photons), and specifically light that is carrying useful information, be it voice telephony, images data-files, or measurement signals, or performing some other useful purpose, such as remote illumination.

Photonic engineers unlock the enormous bandwidth that is in an optical fibre; they deliver the huge storage capacity of a CD-rom; their expertise provides the images making keyhole-surgery possible; they implement the all-optical control networks, which enhance safety in industrial environments wherein electrical signals are fire hazards. Soon photonic engineers will develop processors with speeds thousands of times faster than anything currently available and laser instrumentation for new medical procedures. Today, photonics is an area of great excitement and possibilities.

	Optical fibres
	Optical signal processing
	Optical communications
	Optical devices

Career Opportunities

The opportunities for those engineers who will graduate with expertise in photonics during this coming decade are outstanding. Australia's photncs industry has an established reputation as on of the most successful and innovative in the world, and exports to every continent. Major international photonic device companies (e.g Alcatel, JDS Uniphase, Lucent, Mortel) have operation based here; there are smaller local instrumentation; there are telecommunication carriers (Telstra, Optus, Powertel) and other operations (electricity utilities, railways) who use large-scale photonic technologies.