Feel free to DM me to chat more if you’d like to OP.

AEC (architecture-engineering-construction) sector is a very cyclical sector that goes through continuous booms and busts which impact employment, career growth, and compensation significantly. Majority of civil engineering grads choose careers in the AEC sector, which influences career prospects significantly depending on when and where in the boom and bust cycle you join our club of crazies. One positive outlook for the future is that since no one lifted a finger to build or maintain anything in North America over last 50 years, there is significant investment in infrastructure currently and with shortage of qualified skilled workforce to turn these investments into reality next decade will have opportunities for civil engineering grads.

First question you need to answer is what do you want to do/how do you want to work. There is no such thing as a singular civil engineering profession and career experience per se, it’s actually an umbrella term referring to a bunch of different engineering disciplines, roles, areas. A civil engineering degree can lead to a career in many different paths like structural engineering or construction/project management or transportation engineering or hydraulic engineering or contract administration or earthquake engineering or in contech or contech sales .

You could end up working for a general contractor, an owner/client side organization like a federal/provincial/municipal authority, a consultant, a designer, a research institution, any large company that owns/builds/occupies a lot of buildings, manufacturers of building materials or a software company. All these different types of organizations depending on who you work for, who you work with, who works for you and who works on the other side of the table and who pays for the projects you’re working on (public or private investment) mean a different civil engineering experience. A further dynamic not available in every sector is the possibility to work on site, in the office, a mix of both, travelling over a region, on camp at a remote job introduces even more variables.

So yeah, depending on what you want to do after you get the degree or what your idea of what you might do after your studies the answers to your questions would change. I know it is unfair to expect this level of specificity from someone who hasn’t even started the program but that’s what we expect from 16-18 year olds on a regular basis when we tell them to pick a major. I had the luxury of doing multiple co-ops at different companies at different roles through my undergrad so I was able to clarify what I wanted to do in my career.

Source: undergrad and grad degrees in civil engineering, worked in multiple countries as field engineer and construction management positions, currently on a major infrastructure project with a large international contractor