What is Civil Engineering? Definition, Skills & Salary

However, civil engineering isn’t all about iconic buildings. If you want to get a full picture of “What does civil engineering mean?” the ideal answer sounds like “Go outdoors and have a walk throughout your native city!” Civil engineering is about dealing with the design and development of the infrastructure every person depends on daily — we move somewhere on roads, bridges, and railways; we consume energy via specific constructions; we can’t imagine a high level of life without water supply, sewerage, wiring systems, and so on.

This type of engineering is what allows a tiny village or a metropolitan city to develop and function as a fully-featured community.

Civil engineering consists of a few industries that include investment and construction solutions, engineering support for construction stuff, as well as the exploitation of projects.

All those things should be mentioned while giving the explanation to “What is civil engineering all about?” as they are an integral part of the industry.

What are Civil Engineers?

Many young people, especially students are interested in a civil engineering career because they think that the art of designing marvelous things for the good of the country is a great chance to leave a personal mark in history. So, if you want to dedicate your life to creative activity, let’s get acquainted with what it means to be a civil engineer.

What is a civil engineer in terms of responsibilities in general? Civil engineers should maintain the building infrastructure to function effectively. They have to make titanic efforts to adapt this infrastructure to meet the following three key aspects to implement a solution properly: population growth, ecological turnover, and natural disasters.

One more task of civil engineers consists of the skills to find all possible options to deliver a project successfully even when there is a little budget in the company to pay for it.

In view of the above-mentioned, a brief but informative summary on the profession sounds as follows: civil engineers should resolve complex cases and implement them to literally formulate every constituent of the surrounding we live in.

Types of Civil Engineering

Civil engineering is represented by several branches that grasp structural, environmental, geotechnical, municipal, and transport specialties. Let’s briefly consider every type:

Structural engineering is connected with assessing and building the components of physical infrastructures like complex platforms for railway lines, overpasses, bridges, offshore structures like oil, gas fields in the sea/ocean, and so on;
Environmental engineering includes protection-related activities as well as nature conservation events like pollution elimination, solid waste treatment, sustainable engineering, eradicating hazardous waste items, care about densely populated locations, and natural resources placed in such areas;
Geotechnical engineering refers to studying the ground characteristics on which a certain construction solution is to be designed;
Municipal engineering is concerned with the environmental challenges that are under strict control of the municipalities, involving activities that ensure the quality of life of the society: the maintenance of public parks, waste removal, water treatment, water supply systems, and several similar actions;
Transport engineering deals with building transportation systems that are effective in functioning and meet the sustainability trend: air transportation, tunnels, transportation solutions for streets, railways, overpasses, etc.

What Do Civil Engineers Do?

Everything starts with preparing for the tender. The primary and most significant, civil engineer's responsibility consists in evaluating the site area and the nearby locations. This involves the investigation and confirmation of its suitability for a construction purpose.

Civil engineers are responsible for developing a strategy, outlining the essential variables and the factors that require being modified/corrected before the construction starts.

As soon as all the above-mentioned are executed, civil engineers are to build a detailed development layout, bearing the needs of the customer in mind. They should review and confirm the design, any subsequent reports, and any challenges/potential risks of the solution revealed.

When the tender is completed, the proposal will require to be delivered to the officials that control the tendering procedure, guaranteeing that all guidelines, regulations, and rules are fulfilled. It is vital that all safety measures are met while working on the solution.

Finally, during the design phase of the project, it is the responsibility of the civil engineer to supervise the team on site: be ready for an open dialogue with consultants, architects, and contractors. In case a problem occurs, civil engineers are responsible for resolving it.

Steps to Becoming a Civil Engineer

Acquire a Bachelor’s Degree in Civil Engineering.

The first and must-have step to a successful career in civil engineering is earning a bachelor’s degree. This serves as the base level of education demanded to start working.

Get a Civil Engineering Internship.

99 percent of programs demand summer-long or at least one semester of internship to entirely meet degree requirements. Students need an internship to apply theories they’ve studied on-site, acquire practical skills, and get an idea of a certain branch of the field they may get interested in working in.

Decide on a Specialty.

As far as the field involves a variety of work areas, students, as a rule, choose to become a professional in a particular area.

Get Certification via Passing Relevant Exams.

Civil engineers that intend to deliver their services publicly are to move through several phases to become properly licensed: at an ABET-accredited institution, future civil engineering specialists must pass the Fundamentals of Engineering examination (after a bachelor's degree acquired) and complete the Principles and Practices of Engineering examination to be a CE Professional.

Find an Entry-Level Job.

After passing numerous internships, exams, and certifications as well as completing the Engineer-in-Training step, networking will play its role. Students will get a good number of contacts within the field. As far as nowadays, civil engineering still resembles the apprenticeship model, going into the first position is frequently accomplished with the help of existing contacts. Another option to find the first job is exploring job boards such as Engineering Jobs and ASCE.

Salary of a Civil Engineer

Apart from a particular branch where civil engineers decide to work, the field is filled with promising career opportunities as well as well-paid roles. Read more about salary of a civil engineers . The civil engineering positions below describe a few paths a civil engineer may take; the salaries of every role vary accordingly. Let's take a look at them:

Civil Engineer: 88,200 US dollars
Civil Engineering PM: 96,050 US dollars;
Structural Engineer: 70, 300 US dollars.

What Else to Discover about Civil Engineers?

Nowadays they distinguish between the following obligatory knowledge and skills for civil engineers to ideally perform their work.

Real professionals have to cope with the full circle of design aspects of a future project. These people mostly work in the office or meet clients during business appointments. Moreover, one of their responsibilities includes interaction with contractors whose target is controlling what is going on directly on-site.

Civil engineers are required to possess an innovative vision on things. This means they show creativity, multiversity, and non-standard approach to everything in their work.

Civil engineering design specialists should always be able to understand the whole picture of a project in order to interact with other specialists in this sphere where the high-performance communication with customers is of the greatest focus here. This stuff determines “what is civil engineer?”

Nanotechnology in Civil Engineering

The greatest challenge for the nearest future for civil engineers consists of discovering the ways to retrofit existing projects to meet the needs of city residents. This is possible due to the intense development of nanotechnologies in this sphere that include deep investigations of building materials that are up to one hundred nanometers in size. It sounds a bit fantastic but it’s real!

A series of investments have already been made by well-known corporations to improve build structures. Such materials as nano iron and nano silica serve to get rid of the pore structure of materials.

While producing metal beams, they may include copper nanoparticles to a finished product and this will help to minimize the roughness and as a result, reduce the construction’s fatigue. Nanoparticles will be added to forget about the corrosion of metals.

Optimistic Future of the Industry

So, as you see, civil engineering is considered a very complex structure that is impossible to get mastered momentarily. Engineering has great prospects for upstanding development.

Civil engineering of the future already possesses splendid solutions and technologies that are doomed to auspicious use in the world.

The main advantage of civil engineering is that it is constantly practiced, and therefore it designs and gives numerous scientific and technical discoveries to the modern world.