Should You Study Civil Engineering?

When I was in engineering school, we were told that the prospect of earning bucket loads of money and building great skyscrapers and complexes are great.

What they don’t tell you is that as a civil engineer, everything you do is onsite and collaborative, which means that you rarely get to work offsite or remotely.

You also probably only get to put 15 % your 4-year degree to use. I think the most useful subjects I have learned were surveying and on construction techniques. Maybe the occasional structural design subjects, and our selective course on contracts.

I think the latter is the most useful in my career as I started getting freelancing/contracting jobs.

The barrier to entry into the construction side of civil engineering is also quite low, so you also get have people that are doing the profession that weren’t of technical backgrounds, so it is common to feel that you have wasted too much time in tertiary education and got little return from what you learned.

The upside is that unlike electrical engineering whereby you don’t get to see how things were built in steps, in civil, you get to see things come to fruition. It is the oldest profession in the entirety of society.

Our clients were eager to finish builiding electrical and mechanical buildings for natural gas power plants in order to meet their 2023-2024 targets to switch to greener alternatives, so during COVID, a lot of my colleagues who lost their jobs came to join us, and we were still doing business as usual.

It is hard to automate our work, so you cannot be replaced and forgotten. We are also experiencing a huge knowledge gap, whereby the older generations are retiring, but we are not able to train experienced professionals fast enough. Finding the best fit isn’t the easiest.

You may not be replaced immediately, but if you do not update your skills periodically, you’re bound to struggle to get jobs.

Your only competitors are the ones that have a career goal in mind, and strive to better themselves each year, either through acquiring professional certificates or through acquiring more soft skills.

My only advice, is to never hesitate to invest in your own skills!