2017 Graduate of the Year winners
What makes for an outstanding civil engineering graduate? New Civil Engineer’s Graduate awards offer the answer.
A degree in civil engineering is a now a requirement for up to 15% of all engineering vacancies, up from 9% in 2012.
As a skill set, civil engineering is now ranked inside the top 10 most requested skills clusters in the industry.
What technology – and artificial intelligence and automation in particular – will do to that demand is hard to predict. The skill sets required will almost certainly change. But how? And where does a budding graduate civil engineer go to develop the right ones?
This year, New Civil Engineer’s Graduate Awards has tried a little experiment to help answer that last question.
This year the awards recognise three winners: one working for a client, one for a consultant and one for a contractor. The move was designed to test a theory that these three organisations are very different in their nature and seek different skills in their graduate talent.
The finding? Was there any clear difference in skill set? Not really. All nine finalists were highly talented; and all three winning graduates will be outstanding employment candidates who are already making a positive impact in the industry.
But more than that, they also had a clear vision for what they would do as New Civil EngineerGraduate of the Year.
The nine finalists were judged on academic and engineering skills, with emphasis on enthusiasm, initiative and leadership potential.