Some careers are more all-encompassing than others. Many are pleasant and satisfying ways to earn a living, while others are labors of love that can creep into all aspects of the careerist’s life. This is an important distinction you will have to consider as you research the possibilities for your future career. Do you want just a job? Or do you want a true career that will provide personal and professional satisfaction on many levels?"There’s nothing wrong with wanting a job. Many people are happiest with jobs they can leave at the office at the end of the day. They feel less burdened if they can easily separate their personal and professional lives. Hopefully, such an arrangement provides them with the satisfaction that they need. If it does, fine.

But if you are the kind of person who gets out of bed every morning eager to get to work, to do your thing and do it to the best of your ability, then there may be a future for you in civil engineering. As specialties go, there aren’t very many as far-reaching as civil engineering. Nor are there very many as demanding, time-consuming, often-frustrating or ultimately as thrilling. The old saying “Anything that’s worth having is worth working for” describes a career in civil engineering very accurately.

Civil engineers build things. The same could be said for many other professions, but the products created by most of those professions just pale when compared to the things a civil engineer can create in a working lifetime. Everybody appreciates fine furniture, and those who design and build furniture can do a worthwhile and rewarding job. But isn’t an airport or a dam or a super highway a whole lot more impressive? You see, to say that civil engineers build things may be accurate, but it doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story. Civil engineers build things you use every day. They build the things that make other activities possible. It would be hard to fly without airports or to drive without roads. If nobody built bridges there would be lots of places nobody could get to.

Civil engineers build big things. Bridges, dams, tunnels, highways, common roads, factories, railroads, public transportation systems, airports, enormous buildings, military bases and every other variety of massive infrastructure you can think of. They buy steel beams by the thousand. They measure concrete in millions of tons. They calculate their budgets in billions of dollars. The things civil engineers build are so big that if one engineer can take credit for half-a-dozen major projects during an entire career, that was probably a career well spent. Civil engineers built Rome, you know, and, as we all know, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Because it is such a broad profession, there are many specialties within the career of civil engineering. Careerists can specialize in transportation, for example, and work on roads. You could even choose to further specialize and just work on urban highways, for example. Or airports. Or mass transit systems. Then there are dams. Really big dams are relatively few in number, but they need a lot of civil engineers to build them. There are also lots and lots of small dams.

How about military engineering? Infantrymen may do the physical part of building a bridge, but only under the knowledgeable eye of a civil engineer, who may be an officer or a civilian under contract to the Department of Defense. Then there’s really complicated stuff, like figuring out how to bring sewer and water service to every business and household in a densely populated city. Or a remote and isolated small town.

Opportunities for civil engineers are increasing every day. Phenomena like environmental awareness and suburban sprawl, for example, have created new demands for skilled engineers able to solve the complex problems faced by civilization. Population increases, but most metropolitan areas are trying hard to restrain geographical growth. The sewer system installed in your town 50 years ago may not be up to the job any longer. How can this be fixed? More importantly, how can it be fixed with minimal disruption to the buildings and infrastructure already in place? Laying sewer pipe is easy the first time. Laying it underneath existing buildings and roads is a nightmare of complexity. But if you find the idea intriguing, a challenge to your ingenuity, there may be a future for you in this field.

Civil engineers are employed by private businesses, state and local governments, the federal government and the military. Many civil engineers who have a few years of experience choose to become self-employed consultants. That is, instead of working for one company and doing whatever job comes next, consulting engineers sell their services to organizations that need them just long enough to build something.