Civil Engineering Career

What Is Civil Engineering ?

Civil engineering deals with a variety of construction and maintenance tasks, like building and maintaining roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings, airports, dams, water works, sewage systems and ports. A civil engineer not only requires a high standard of engineering knowledge, but also supervisory and administrative skills. The work involves planning, constructing and maintaining.

The planning and designing part demands site investigation, resource feasibility study and on-the-spot decision making. An engineer has to be quick to make a decision because emergencies do come up and need to be dealt with then and there. Other important duties of an engineer involve taking care of work within the local government guidelines and getting permission for plans, creating a cost estimate and construction schedules and post-completion maintenance of the project.

There are many specialized branches of civil engineering such as dealing with structures, water resources, environment, construction, transportation and geo- technical engineering. For most projects, civil engineers work in teams or sometimes even in coordination with other engineers.

Civil engineering is ideal for those who love to create and the job is monetarily rewarding and involves a lot of responsibility. An engineer is directly responsible for public safety and welfare. Safety should be the first priority of any engineer. If they are involved in constructing residences, they have to follow the safety precautions involved too. In the case of a highway, they are expected to follow traffic safety rules.

Engineers have to look out for potential hazards, including environmental impacts and estimated life expectancy of the project. Natural disasters make it important for engineers to be extra cautious about environmental pressures.