The Overall Demand, Duties, Salaries and Working Conditions

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The Overall Demand for Civil Engineers

Since the beginning of World War II, technological change in the United States has taken place at an ever increasing rate. This rapid pace of technical change has produced changes in the style and standard of living throughout the United States and Western Europe. Increasing emphasis and dependence on technology has produced an increase in the demand for engineers that has been relatively constant since the early 1940s. This strong demand for all types of engineers, on the average, has not held true for all branches of engineering during all of the past 50 years.

A high percentage (about 17 percent) of all the students enrolled in engineering curricula in 1975, for example, were civil engineering students. This high enrollment reflected a very strong demand for civil engineers in the mid 1970s for work in pollution control, energy supply, and environmental protection. In the early 1980s, in contrast, a national emphasis on defense and computer technology led to a much lower percentage of students enrolling in civil engineering programs than in other fields. In the early 1990s, enrollment began to climb again. In 1992, 16 percent of all the students enrolled in engineering were civil engineering students. Ironically, the demand for civil engineering graduates has remained relatively steady. What this means is that there have always been jobs for civil engineering graduates, but during the 1970s when civil engineering enrollments accounted for a high percentage of the total engineering enrollment, the graduating civil engineers had fewer job offers to choose among than did the civil engineering students who graduated in the late 1980s.

The most important factor to consider, however, is that there has always been a steady demand for civil engineering graduates. There is very little likelihood that this demand will ever disappear. The current outlook calls for a 24 percent increase in the workforce by 2005 as fast as average for all professions. The types of activities in which civil engineers are engaged are critical to the continuing life of the United States. These activities range from the most fundamental, such as the supply of drinking water, to the most sophisticated, such as the construction of space stations. The decrease in spending for public works (transportation systems, sewer systems, water supply systems, etc.) during the early 1980s has simply created a serious problem that will face coming generations who will be required to repair and renovate these facilities. Such repair and renovation obviously will require civil engineers. The bottom line is that the employment prospects for civil engineers in the past have been good to excellent, they are good at the present, and in the future they should become even better.



Job Duties, Salaries, Working Conditions

Here we hope to clarify the possible job duties for a few of the areas of civil engineering. This description is intended to indicate the nature of the work that the civil engineer would encounter at various stages during a professional career.

Finding the right type of work, work that is both a challenge and an opportunity for advancement is more important for a recent graduate, than getting a high starting salary. Salary almost never appears at the top of the list of answers when engineers are asked to indicate those items that they consider important in the ideal job. Usually, salaries show up in third or fourth place. The great majority of practicing engineers consider that the most desirable characteristics about a job are: 1) opportunity for advancement; 2) creative, challenging work; 3) good salary; 4) recognition of achievement; and 5) the chance to keep up with new developments in the field.

This ranking should not be interpreted to mean that engineers have little interest in money. What this ranking really means is that for most engineers, it has not been a serious problem to consider what kind of salary they will receive. In other words, most civil engineers simply have not worried about salaries because they have been in a seller's market since about 1950. The salary information contained here was current at the time of publication (1996). To get the latest news on the field and on projects in progress, including information about salary trends, you'll want to read journals like Civil Engineering (see CE's salary index) and Engineering News Record. You can also read government statistics in the Occupational Outlook Handbook and in periodicals from the Bureau of Labor Statistics such as Occupational Outlook Quarterly, which are available at many libraries. Engineers, a newsletter of the American Association of Engineering Societies, also track salary trends. Of course, not all branches of engineering receive the same average salaries. However, on the average, salaries paid to engineers are significantly higher than salaries received by most other professionals. Again, on the average, civil engineers' salaries tend to be lower initially than the salaries paid to members of other branches of engineering. However, the difference in average salaries is a small percentage of the salary itself. Additionally, a number of civil engineers are among the most highly paid engineers in the United States. These engineers are those who own or who are partners in private consulting or construction companies. We will give detailed information about typical salaries in this chapter, but first we will talk about some of the more important job characteristics such as the nature of the work you would be doing as a civil engineer.
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