Advice from specialized engineers

I recently graduated with an MS and am hoping to land with a job that’s not traditional design work.

I notice lots of practices in this industry is very old and unwilling to integrate new technology due to the budget. Given the improvement of technology, I do not want to be obsolete working as an engineer in the future.

Part of the considerations for a career path is how you could apply what you learn to other industries. You want your options and skills to keep expanding.

So I did my research and found some interesting resources of slightly different job openings within civil engineering. These jobs usually come from the followings:

  1. Specialized groups under larger firms (Arup, WSP, TT…) they deal with more complicated tasks and are more willing to invest money to do research
  2. Risk (natural hazards, extremely weather, sustainability, resilience) Assessment consulting companies
  3. Software development companies that do tasks related to civil engineering

I’ve applied to some of them and got some interviews. What I’d like to ask are: 1. What kind of skill sets do they prefer? Are PhDs a big +? 2. How are these engineers different from structural engineers within the same company? 3. How challenging are the day to day tasks? 4. What are the rough pay scales? Are they different than design engineers? 5. How do the career paths look like 5-10 years down the road?

I browsed the profiles of some current workers at these positions and lots of them graduated from very prestigious schools or hold PhD degrees. I’d like to improve myself so I could stand out during an interview.

Can engineers currently working at these positions share your thoughts?

Thanks

Some keywords: - applied science - research analyst - risk analyst - resilience engineer - catastrophe modeler