Electronic Test Development Engineer

1What you'd actually do

• Writing test software — commonly in LabVIEW, Python, C# or C — that drives instruments (power supplies, oscilloscopes, signal generators, multimeters) to stimulate a circuit board and record what comes back, then decides pass or fail against limits.
• Designing and wiring test fixtures: the physical jig that holds a board, makes contact with test points (often a 'bed of nails' fixture with spring-loaded pins), and connects it to the instruments. This can mean CAD work, cable looms, connector selection and a lot of soldering.
• Sitting at a bench with a failing unit, an oscilloscope and the circuit schematic, working out whether the fault is in the product, the test fixture, the test software or the limits you set.
• Reading schematics and datasheets from the design team and turning the product specification into a test plan — deciding what actually needs measuring, what can be inferred, and what would take too long to test on every unit.
• Talking to production operators and technicians about a test that keeps throwing false failures, or that's too slow and holding up the line, and then changing the rig or the software to fix it.
• Writing and updating documentation: test procedures, calibration records, and validation evidence that the test system does what it claims — heavier in regulated sectors like medical and aerospace.
• Analysing test result data across batches to spot drift, marginal designs or a recurring failure mode, and feeding that back to the design engineers.

2How graduates get in

• Direct entry as a graduate engineer into a manufacturer's test or manufacturing engineering team. This is the most common route — many employers in this space are mid-sized firms that hire one or two graduates at a time rather than running big schemes.
• Structured graduate schemes at larger engineering, defence, aerospace and automotive employers. These usually rotate you through several teams (design, manufacturing, quality, test) before you specialise, and are more competitive and more formalised than direct entry.
• A placement year or summer internship in a test, production or hardware engineering team, converted into a graduate offer. This is a strong route because test work rewards hands-on familiarity that's hard to demonstrate on paper.
• Starting in a test technician role after an apprenticeship or HND and moving up into development work — very common in this field, and worth knowing because it means your colleagues may have more practical experience than degree-level theory.
• Moving across from a related graduate role — hardware design, systems engineering, production or manufacturing engineering — after a year or two. Test is often somewhere people arrive rather than aim for from the start.
• Occasionally from a software or physics background where the employer wants automation and instrument-control programming skills and will teach the electronics. Less common, but it happens, particularly where the test systems are software-heavy.

3What employers ask for

• A degree in electronic or electrical engineering is the standard ask. Related degrees — mechatronics, general engineering, physics, computer engineering — are frequently accepted, especially if you can show hands-on electronics work. Pure computer science is a harder sell unless the role is heavily automation-focused.
• Grade expectations vary a lot. Large graduate schemes often ask for a 2:1; many smaller manufacturers care more about whether you can read a schematic and use a scope, and will take a 2:2 with good practical evidence. Some still ask for specific A-level grades, others don't look past the degree.
• Demonstrable hands-on experience: a final-year project involving real hardware, a placement year, robotics or electronics societies, or personal projects with microcontrollers. Employers in this area take practical evidence seriously because the job is physical as well as analytical.
• Some programming ability. Which language matters less than showing you can automate something — Python and C are the most transferable, LabVIEW is widely used in test specifically and is usually taught on the job.
• Security clearance eligibility if you're going into defence or aerospace. This normally requires UK residency for a set period and can rule out or delay some applicants, so check before applying.
• Chartered status (CEng, via the IET or IMechE) is not needed to get in, but employers accredited for it will often expect you to work towards it. An IET-accredited degree makes that path simpler.

4Skills that matter

5Where it leads

1. Graduate or junior test engineer: working on parts of an existing test system, supporting production issues, and learning the products under supervision. Typically the first couple of years, though schemes with rotations can stretch this.

2. Test development engineer with ownership of whole test systems for a product — you write the test strategy, specify the rig, and hand it over to manufacturing. Timelines to reach this vary widely by employer size; it happens faster at smaller firms where there's less of a queue.

3. Senior or principal test engineer, or a move into a specialism such as RF test, automated test equipment (ATE) architecture, environmental and reliability testing, or design-for-test — advising design teams on how to make products testable in the first place.

4. Branching sideways into related engineering roles. Common destinations are hardware design, manufacturing or process engineering, systems engineering, quality engineering and product validation, because test work exposes you to all of them.

5. Management or technical-authority tracks: leading a test or manufacturing engineering team, or staying technical as a chartered engineer and principal specialist. Some move into technical sales or applications engineering for test equipment vendors, which pays well and uses the same knowledge.

6Where this varies

The role changes a lot with sector and company size. In regulated industries — medical devices, aerospace, defence, rail — a large share of the job is documentation, traceability and formal validation, and the pace is slower and more procedural. In consumer electronics and telecoms the emphasis is on high volume, cycle time and cost per unit tested. At small firms you may do everything from fixture wiring to test software to supporting the production line, and pick things up quickly; at large firms the work is more specialised and you might focus on one narrow area for a long time. There's also a distinction between production test (repeatable testing of every unit built) and design verification or environmental test (proving a new design works across temperature, vibration and EMC) — both are called test engineering but the day-to-day is quite different, so check which one a job advert actually means. Geographically, roles cluster around established electronics manufacturing areas including the South West, South Wales, the Thames Valley, Cambridge, central Scotland and parts of the North West and Midlands.