civil guy wondering what the future holds 1

[CRAIGSTANLEY]

I work in the materials side of civil engineering

My job is to teach materials classes to engineers and technicians, which I have grown to like very much. I teach 300-400 technicians and engineers materials courses each year.

I also am involved in materials meetings regarding establishing specifications and often deal with contractors that want to make changes to specifications or want to understand specifications better. In addition, I help write materials specifications and learn alot doing so.

Currently I am extremely happy with my job, and hope to retire from my current employee.

However, time does change things, and I often wonder if I have a change of heart years down the road, what options would I have with my desribed above experience???

I feel I lack design experience desipte having a MSCE and a PE. I would be scared to ever stamp anything, since my experience is limited in actual design. My PE stamp sits on my desk as a trophy and has not been used to stamp anything. My job does not require me to design or stamp anything. I am more of a manager/teacher/negotiator

I am pretty well rounded in materials...I can do concrete designs, asphalt designs, soil tests...However my experience with materials is totally textbook/laboratory in nature and is has not utilized on a practical...that is on an actual engineering project.

I am filled up with education, theories, equations, and lab experiments, but I realize the real design world is much different than theories. If I had to go look for a job at this point, I would feel like a rookie on an interview since I have never had any real life design experience.

 

[plasgears]

Make yourself available to small structural fab shops or erectors for part time consultation. It's the small organizations that run lean on the professional side. Also, contact some law firms to provide expert testimony in failure analysis. You have the credentials.

 

[HgTX]

I'm in a similar boat. I'm the liaison between my agency and the steel fabricators. I am not a designer. I deal with fabrication processes and materials (and lots and lots of specifications).

So down the road, it's really easy for a designer to relocate, but I don't see any job listings for "Fabrication Engineer". (And the PE licensing process doesn't recognize such a concept either.)

My aim for when I finally decide to leave the public sector is along the lines of what plasgears suggests.

It's sort of reassuring to see someone else in a similar position to mine.

Hg

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[TomBarsh]

I also feel "in the same boat"; that is, that I am getting to know more and more about less and less, until... But maybe this is just the way it goes for everyone as they progress through their years and career?

Certainly we don't want to have 20 years of experience but as the same one year 20 years over and over.

But isn't it natural that as we progress along in a particular field that we will get more and more specialized? An exception might be a "project manager"...but even that generalist would have the same problem when moving into a more specialized position like design work, etc.

 

[HgTX]

My concern isn't exactly a matter of specialization. There's this whole category within civil engineering that isn't really acknowledged. There's design, and there's project management...and then there's that magic step that happens between raw material (aggregate, steel plate, etc.) and what arrives at the jobsite on trucks.

Hg

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