<p>So, with the global economy pulling down, and most of the countries in recession, has the construction industry been hit hard? Especially civil engineers. I hear a lot of people saying civil engineering will become history before it rebounds. Even though Labour Statistics show a more than average growth, i hear its dead and many say those statistics are not real. I even read many blog reviews, including college confidential, about jobs, and under civil engineering, they just keep whining about its unemployment these days. Is it really happening? Is hard to believe because when i google for engineering jobs, there almost 8500 jobs available in UK alone. I need help regarding this because i am planning to do a degree on civil engineering.</p>
<p>Well who do you trust: experts whose job it is to assess careers at the BLS or people one blogs and forums? The only question you need to ask yourself is whether or not you think that in the future, people will still need to construct buildings, roads, and other infrastructure. If the answer is yes (hint: the answer is yes), then civil engineering will be just fine.</p>
<p>Like many fields, civil engineering employment varies by economic and industry cycles. The real estate and construction boom in the mid-2000s followed by the attendant crash in 2008-2009 had obvious effects on civil engineering employment during those times. Of course, economic and industry conditions may be different four years from now.</p>
<p>If that is your major, I would definitely switch right away. To electrical, aerospace, or mechanical. Much more secure in job prospects.</p>
<p>Other areas of engineering had cycles of better or worse employment prospects. For example, when the USSR came to an end, US military needs for aircraft, missiles, and the like declined; aerospace jobs declined along with that.</p>
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Construct AND repair. Once you build something, it does <em>not</em> last forever. If you don’t make necessary repairs, it will cause a domino effect that can further harm the economy and deteriorate civilization.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, I’m in the construction industry and I’m doing fine. There were a lot of layoffs a few years ago, but it’s gotten better since (at least in my area). Recently, I’ve been seeing news of new hires in our company every few weeks.</p>
<p>With that being said, there are highs and lows and the economy can vary immensely from one part of the world to the other.</p>
<p>It’s cyclical, but there will always be a need for infrastructure. So no it’s not dead.</p>
<p>I’m an electrical engineer and I can’t count how many fellow electrical engineers I’ve seen get laid off and their jobs sent to China, India, etc… As for mechanical engineers, I think it’s been worse for them.</p>
<p>The nice thing about civil engineering is the difficulty of outsourcing it. Sure, some of the functions can go, but someone needs to visit the job sites. Also, there is an abundance of municipality jobs for civil engineers. When was the last time you saw a township hire an electrical or aerospace engineer?</p>
<p>I’m sorry for this soapbox diatribe I’m about to spew, but…
What needs to happen is our politicians need to stop fixating on “job creation” and start spending some time on “job saving.” It is insane for the US to continue to allow an unfair playing field. The US regulates and taxes companies to point of a choke hold and at the same time allow foreign companies, unburdened by either, to compete head to head with our domestic industries.</p>
<p>Think about it for a minute. If you make something in the United States, companies need to conform to OSHA rules for worker safety, EPA rules for environmental safety, pay high Social Security costs for employees, high insurance, high local/state/federal taxes, high utility costs, etc… </p>
<p>But when we allow foreign manufacturers to export to us, we don’t insist on any of those things. Look at the Bejing Olymipics. They shut down factories in a 100 mile radius for weeks just to get the air quality up and it never even reached “acceptable”. Their rivers run technicolor with toxins. OSHA? Worker safety?! Don’t make them laugh! Workers are disposable over there.</p>
<p>And that’s the kind of companies we allow to compete with American firms who protect their workers, protect our environment, pay social security benefits, pay taxes to our country?!?! It’s no wonder the CEOs and boards of American companies outsource to Asia. It’s not greed! IT IS SURVIVAL!!! If they didn’t do it, there would be no company.</p>
<p>Someone has got to stop the insanity.</p>
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Of course, this doesn’t solve the other big problems of civils: its cyclical nature (recession=less building) and the fact that you can still import workers.</p>
<p>Hopefully, our friends in Congress will actually make businesses play by the same rules as everyone else. Not going to happen when we’re in some serious gridlock though.</p>
<p>Quote:
“I’m an electrical engineer and I can’t count how many fellow electrical engineers I’ve seen get laid off and their jobs sent to China, India, etc… As for mechanical engineers, I think it’s been worse for them.”</p>
<p>No, it’s NOT worse for mechanical engineers. from my experience and the people i know, mechanical engineers pretty much have a broad knowledge of everything from what civil engineers know to simple electrical engineering basics. thus, you encounter mechanical engineers all over the industries, from semiconductor manufacturing, civil construction projects, automotive, aerospace and defense, etc.
so i recommend the OP do undergrad with mechanical engineering, which is pretty much civil engineering in the microscale. you pretty much need to get a master’s degree to be involved in any structural design work anyway. just take the requirements you need for going to grad school in civil engineering.
if you get a civil engineering degree, it’s pretty much a dead-end street for you. but if you do undergrad in mechanical engineering, you’re more versatile and thus, have more doors open for you in either grad school or industry.</p>
<p>Quote:
“The nice thing about civil engineering is the difficulty of outsourcing it. Sure, some of the functions can go, but someone needs to visit the job sites. Also, there is an abundance of municipality jobs for civil engineers. When was the last time you saw a township hire an electrical or aerospace engineer?”</p>
<p>Dude, all types of engineers work for the city (township). the municipality has to hire electrical engineers to maintain and develop the electrical infrastructure. the civil engineers don’t know jack about electrical wiring, HVAC stuff, or least not as much as the EE’s and ME’s do.
Also, you just can’t count on the municipality to do most of the civil engineering hiring. perhaps that’s why civil engineering grads are suffering so much in the unemployment line. dude, most of the engineers that work for the municipality are old people anyway who ain’t gonna retire any time soon to free up openings for the younger folks, and even if they do, it’s not enough to compensate for all those grads out there. fyi, it’s very difficult to get an engineering job in the municipality because the supply is greater than the demand.</p>
<p>and all that talk about outsourcing is mostly untrue. manufacturing jobs are outsourced to places like China and IT jobs are being outsourced to India. most of the design and development are still being done in the US. look at the way semiconductor companies are operating these days - the status quo is “fabless.”</p>
<p>Yesterday I heard all the civil engineers got fired, but then the internet broke so I couldn’t google it and check.</p>
<p>I found an internship pretty easily and I’m civil. Working for an oil and gas contractor building a Shell TLP rig. Working with mechanicals too.</p>
<p>quicksilver,</p>
<p>I’m a 50-something and write from some experience. </p>
<p>I didn’t mean to say all civil engineers can work at municipalities. I simply pointed out one venue that will stay here… along with any other venue which demands a hands-on/eyes-on function. That type of on-site demand does not exist in many other fields.</p>
<p>The two fields I mentioned with regards to townships were my own (electrical) and aerospace. There might be an electrical engineer working in a municipality somewhere, but probably not as the function of an electrical engineer. The examples you cited are handled by electricians. An electrical engineer can do that function, but it’s waste of a diploma.</p>
<p>As for aerospace engineers being hired by townships. C’mon. ;-)</p>
<p>Your example about the semi industry with regards to outsource… well… I’m still laughing!!! That’s the field I’m in!!! … have been for over 30 years! It’s not just the fab jobs (BTW… tons of process and test engineers) that have gone to Asia. It’s the design jobs too. You’re kidding yourself if you believe differently. </p>
<p>It’s not just the semi designers getting hit. It’s across the electronics industry. I wish I could share with you the SIA data showing the declining numbers for demand creation in the USA. We are dropping significantly every year. </p>
<p>Even with the rising salaries overseas, there are still enormous inequalities which force companies to seek foreign design services and open foreign design centers.</p>
<p>The exodus of good jobs is at the professional level and has been for years. IMHO, that’s the untold dirty little secret behind our country’s financial instability. The professional sector has been, and is being gutted.</p>
<p>I’ve been far luckier than I deserved to be in my career (life in general too!) and have only one child. I’ll be able to shield him, launch him, and support him through just about anything. His education, a house, cars… even food on the table if I had to. I can take care of it all. It’s the rest of you I wring my hands every day for. Unless our politicians do something to make our professional workforce competitive with third world countries, the outlook is bleak with no safe port in this storm.</p>
<p>Come now. The politicians are too busy sabotaging Congress to actually get anything done.</p>
<p>I’m a structural engineer and doing fine, also. There is ALWAYS work to be done. And it’s very satisfying to look around town and see all the buildings we helped design and/or renovate. I can’t imagine our work being outsourced - there are too many site-dependent factors involved, and building codes are getting more complicated every year.</p>
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<p>Could you imagine that people could be brought in on visas to do the work that you do now, as happens in other professions? Just curious. Especially since in the past, you expressed distress about other companies low-balling your estimates. There are visas now that allow non-US citizens to create startups in the US, provided that they employ some % of people who are already legally eligible to work in the US. However, these companies could offer to do work at any price that meets existing labor laws (e.g. meets minimum wage requirements).</p>
<p>Well, I can’t imagine them coming to Maine, lol.</p>
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<p>Why not? I’ve heard that there have been efforts to get immigrants to start companies and live in places like Buffalo and other depressed parts of upstate NY. Is Maine any worse?</p>
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[GDP</a> - per capita (PPP)](<a href=“https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html]GDP”>https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html)</p>
<p>Whenever I start feeling too sorry for myself I find it helpful to think about how unfair it is for people born into a dramatically lower standard of living. Equalization is tough for those of us on the top, but the alternative isn’t defensible by my moral standards.</p>
<p>Construction in different parts of the world isn’t always designed or done the same way. I remember visiting a prestigious university in India as part of some research I was doing. Somebody noted that the people in the class there were not very familiar with structural steel building since it wasn’t utilized as much there as it is over here.</p>
<p>Don’t forget that different areas also have different building codes. It’s not like some of the other fields where everybody plays by the same rules. There is a learning curve. The most significant differences will come in subterranean construction, where engineers in one part of the country know how to work with the conditions there, but not so much in another part. </p>
<p>The above only discusses the structural and geotechnical branches of civil engineering. Don’t forget about transportation engineering and environmental engineering. Those are pretty specific to the country. I highly doubt countries halfway around the world have the same MUTCD, AASHTO and EPA regulations as we do here.</p>
<p>Sure, people can learn it and work here, but is it worth the time and money to train them? It’s not like there’s an excess of civil engineers elsewhere in the world.</p>