There are numerous reasons why a Civil or Structural engineer may want to learn programming. Reasons our students give include:
- I just like to learn new things
- I want to decrease the boring and repetitive parts of your civil engineering career
- I am passionate about an optimization problem that deals with a lot of data
- I think coding is cool
These are great reasons to learn to code. In fact, coding has often been referred to by some famous people as a fundamental skill of the 21st century, with many famous quotes on the subject from minds like Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, and even Snoop Dogg.
But as a Civil or Structural engineer working in the rather traditional construction industry, these are quite abstract reasons to learn coding. You may be wondering how this applies to your day to day job and workflows and struggling to see a practical reason to learn coding as a Structural engineer. We are going to present here our top three practical reasons we believe every civil or structural engineer should learn code. These are reasons that affect you as the day to day “do-er” of a civil or structural engineering company, and the benefits to you and your career.
1) Accelerate your Career and Salary 💰
Who wouldn’t be interested in a higher salary and faster career progression? The only way of course to do this is to have a competitive advantage over your peers. This is why this is the number one reason civil engineers should learn to code – it will provide you with this competitive advantage. Most civil and structural engineering companies struggle to find qualified engineers who can code. Those who can code, can complete tasks faster and with higher quality that those who do not code. As such, such employees are more desirable to employers and can demand a higher salary in civil and structural engineering.
For instance, we find that many of our students enjoy more promotions that their peers, and regularly credit that their knowledge of coding was a primary reason for this advantage. For example, our founder enjoyed 5 promotions from graduate engineer to associate director over the course of 7 years at an elite design firm, a progression that takes around 15 years. Of course, a fast career and salary progression in civil engineering is not only driven by knowing coding – one still needs to be a good engineer. However, as we will see in the next reasons for why civil engineers should learn coding, coding allows for you to engineer in ways that others cannot, making you more valuable to any civil engineering company.
2) Reducing Your Overtime ⏩
Our jobs as building engineers are continually getting more demanding as the construction industry faces big challenges. Project schedules are getting shorter to complete the same amount of engineering design work, which means longer hours for engineers. Project fees are decreasing, meaning there civil engineering salaries are not growing fast over time. On top of all of this, construction projects are becoming more complex, as clients demand more deliverables and changes during the design than ever before. All of this increased responsibility falls on the shoulders of the day to day project engineers – the people who do the engineering calculations, create the drawings, and models – resulting in longer and more intense hours in the office.
Civil Engineer Engineer Wanted:
Expected Working Hours – 19 Hours/Day
Requirements:
1. Should be able to speak with fish (talking with the mammals will be a plus)
2. Should have participated in the at least one World War, preferably both,
3. Should have scored 5 goals in FIFA World Cup Finals,
4. Should have been involved in building the Egyptian pyramids and the Great Wall of China
Expected Salary – 200USD per month
It really does feel like more than ever, this fictional job post is reflects the reality of contemporary civil and structural engineering!
If you are feeling the pain of long and stressful hours in civil or structural engineering, then learning coding is one way to get back your work-life balance. This is because learning to code will allow you to automate parts of your job. This will allow you to do tasks your boss assigns to you in minutes, rather than days or weeks. As you improve in applying coding to your workflows, you will gradually reduce your reliance on overtime to deliver your projects, earning back your nights and weekends to do what you want!
3) Work on the Best Projects 🏗️
The top engineering design firms all invest heavily into computational engineering tools and skillsets in their teams. If you aspire to work for the top companies and the best projects in those companies, a certification that you can code will set you apart as these firms specifically look for engineers who have computational engineering skills and can code. Our students have often times accredited their success often times accredited their success in an interview or salary negotiation to a certificate that gain from completing one of our courses.
Even if you do not work for a top tier engineering firm yet, we all know that in any civil or structural engineering office that working on certain projects leads to better experience for the CV than others. Nobody wants to get stuck working on a problematic project for years where they are just ‘replaceable’ resource. Knowing how to apply coding to your work as a civil engineer will make you an asset to your company because you will be able to do things faster and better than those who are not using coding. Your company will see you as more than just an average engineer, and as such, will assign you to better projects – the kind of projects everyone wants to have on their CV.
There are many other reasons and benefits for civil or structural engineer to learn coding. However, hopefully it is clear from these reasons that the average civil or structural engineer stands to gain quite a bit from some basic knowledge of coding. Knowledge of coding will make you a powerful computational engineer. In order to achieve this status, you will need to learn how to code. But what coding language should a civil or structural engineer learn? Check out our list of Common Programming Languages for Civil and Structural Engineers and our list of Courses to find out more!