When I was in university and I had to choose what field of engineering I had to go into, I really wasn’t sure which one I should choose. There was so much information available: online, from the careers center, other classmates, and a hundred other places, including my own thoughts and feelings on the matter.

So many competing ideas of what I wanted to get out of my career. What did I want out of a typical day at work? What did I value from a career? What was important to me?

How could I even know what I valued, I was so young and had never even had a “real” job yet.

If this describes you, or maybe you’re just looking at starting a new career, I put this article together to help you decide if you should become a geotechnical engineer.

What Does a Geotechnical Engineer Do?

There are a bunch of articles on this already listed in Google. Most of them say the same things, and seem to be written by people who have never been a geotechnical engineer, or are extremely vague and leave almost no impression as to what a typical geotechnical engineer does on a day to day basis.

Now, I can only speak from my experience. I have worked entirely at small engineering firms, not any large international companies, and from what I hear – the experience is quite different. At a large engineering firm it seems you would be assigned to very specific pieces of each project, and asked to perform that piece over and over and over. You will be very, very good at that little piece of each project.

At a small firm, and what I am experienced in, you have to wear a lot of hats. Almost every day is different, but each day consists of many of the same tasks.

Typical Duties

When I first started out my responsibilities were quite minor. Basically, a lot of field testing, and senior engineers sending me to the field to be their eyes and ears and report back site conditions. As your career progresses and you gain experience, you would be the one sending junior engineers to take site observations.

Your typical duties can be broken into two main categories: fieldwork, and office work.

Fieldwork

As you may expect, a geotechnical engineer gets to go outside a lot. You have to go to construction sites to look at the soil, feel the soil, test the soils, and get a feel for the project.

Fieldwork typically consists of

• bearing capacity inspections,
• geotechnical field drilling,
• construction monitoring, and
• compaction testing.

Each type of fieldwork is completely different from one another, and require different sets of knowledge and experience.

Bearing Inspection

Typically performed immediately prior to concrete footings being poured. A geotechnical engineer will visit the site and assess the soil conditions below the footing locations and compare them to the design bearing capacity provided by the structural engineer. Bearing inspections are required for projects large and small – sometimes you will be assigned a bearing inspection for a large building, or a single family home. It’s always something new.

Time Investment: LOW – a bearing inspection usually takes less than an hour.

Geotechnical Field Drilling

Typically done during the planning stages of a project. A geotechnical investigation requires significant office work, but also relies heavily on fieldwork. A client will tell you they’ve got a new project in their pipeline, send you the preliminary plans, and ask you to plan a geotechnical investigation. Your job is to then plan boreholes of varying depths depending on the size of the building throughout the building footprint, coordinate with utility locators, drillers, and land owners, and perform the field drilling.

During drilling you will be taking the drill rig to each borehole location, telling the drillers how deep they need to go, and taking soil samples from the augers and split spoon sampler. The geotechnical engineer during field drilling is also responsible for logging soil conditions, depths, soil descriptions, in field test results, and installing piezometers for groundwater monitoring. Once the field drilling portion is completed, the rest of the geotechnical investigation takes place in the office.

Time Investment: VARIES – some geotechnical drilling programs can be completed in an afternoon. Other programs take several days, can be in remote locations, and move slowly. You’ll probably end up spending more than a few nights in a hotel in your career.

Construction Monitoring

Typically required for higher risk or more complicated projects with a large budget. When performing construction monitoring, you will typically have been provided with plans that specify certain parameters that the construction crew must achieve, and you must check. If they haven’t met the specifications, it is your responsibility to tell them, and give recommendations on how to get where they need to be. Be prepared for some level of conflict with contractors. They will try to be your buddy so you’ll pass their work even if it fails. Don’t fall into that trap.

Time Investment: HIGH – construction has long hours, and if crews are working, you are monitoring. Expect long hours, long days, and if you’re lucky – overtime pay. Most engineers are salary, so don’t get your hopes up.

Compaction Testing

Usually relegated to only new EITs, so you can expect to do a lot of it when you first begin your career. Compaction testing consists of using a nuclear densometer to test compacted backfill and compare the results to a lab determined value to assess how compacted the material is. Construction plans will typically have a specified compaction percentage you will need to confirm before allowing contractors to continue backfilling. Although it may seem pointless and boring, you will gain a lot of useful experience by doing a good amount of compaction testing.

Time Investment: HIGH – Construction crews work long hours. That means you will too.

Office Work

As your career progresses you can expect to spend more and more time in the office. Your experience becomes more expensive, your hourly chargeable rate gets higher, and clients want you working on documents, not driving around for $150/hr. Understandable.

In consulting, there is always something to do in the office. If things are slow and you don’t have a project to work on? Then you try to find projects to work on. (by the way this is something you would never get to do in a larger engineering firm)

Your day to day office work typically consists of

• Business development
  • reaching out to old clients, checking local construction associations for projects to bid on, bidding on projects, writing proposals, setting up meetings with potential clients, etc
• Retaining wall designs
• Geotechnical investigations
• Slope stability assessments

Business Development

Business development is not something you will do much of when you first begin your career, but it is something I was interested in since the beginning of mine. The highest paid engineers are the ones that are not only capable of completing their reports, designs, etc in timely manner, but can find new, lucrative work for themselves and their company. If you can do both, and do both well, you will be far ahead of other engineers.

A typical day of business development generally consists of finding upcoming projects using online tools, contacting general contractors bidding on the project, and offering your company’s services. They usually respond positively, and then you prepare a proposal outlining what specific roles your company can fulfill for the project. This usually takes a lot of reading as every project is different and has hundreds of pages of specifications. You will get faster at this, and learn which sections you can ignore without even looking at them. Winning a job is very exciting, and your boss will reward you for it if you do it with consistency.

If you’re lucky like me, you may be invited to your company’s business development meetings, where you can offer other skills you may have to make your business better. I updated our companies websites, started ad campaigns, and linked Google Analytics to our company website, to get a better handle on where our money is going, and how to make more money.

This is not something you would ever get to do at a large company. Keep that in mind when applying for work, and what your priorities are.

Time Investment: VARIES – For an engineer you will always be juggling business development. Some days you may spend your entire day doing this. Other days you may spend none.

Retaining Wall Designs

Varying from extremely simple to very complicated, retaining wall designs are something that your company may do a lot of. Once you become proficient with them, they can turn into very high margin projects for your company. They generally consist of meeting with clients to learn what they want, using software to design the wall, then drafting the wall into a design package that includes site specific recommendations, specifications, and contract notes.

Some projects may have tight deadlines that you will have to meet. You have entire construction sites waiting on your designs in some cases, so be prepared for some long days.

Time Investment: VARIES – some design packages can be completed in half a day. Others may take up half a week or more.

Geotechnical Investigations

Geotechnical investigations really are the bread and butter of most geotechnical engineers. Expect to do a lot of them, and expect a lot of them to be very similar. Once the field drilling portion is done, you will be responsible for creating neat borehole logs using a borehole software, writing the report based on the project specifics you were given, the testing you performed, the samples you collected, and the observations you made. These are usually pretty boring, but sometimes you get a cool project to work on.

Time Investment: LOW – usually have a lot of time to complete these and no overly tight deadlines. Don’t expect many long days working on the office work portion of a geotechnical investigation.

Slope Stability Assessments

Usually performed in tandem with a geotechnical investigation, a slope stability assessment is performed when a building is being constructed near the toe or the crest of a slope. Projects that include slope stability are usually quite interesting, and your design has a unique intersection with structural engineers as deep foundation elements can be used for both supporting buildings, and reinforcing slopes. Slope stability assessments are my favorite type of project to work on.

You will use information gained from the geotechnical investigation and survey to create a slope model using geotechnical software, and assess the model using varying surcharges, foundation layouts, soil parameters, and slope configurations.

Time Investment: VARIES – again, each project is different. Some project slopes are so tiny you can tell the client things will be fine without doing any drilling. Other projects are very serious and require in depth modelling, drilling, and advanced lab testing.

How Much Does A Geotechnical Engineer Get Paid?

This will vary from region to region and country to country. With that note, I’ll let you research payscales on your own, but I can provide what I have seen in my years as a geotech.

In my experience, geotechnical engineers are amongst the lowest paid of almost every other field of engineering, and we often have the longest hours.

Take that with a grain of salt though. I believe that geotechnical engineers have a unique position to get more easily involved in the business side of engineering than in other fields. If you are more interested in business development and making money for your company than you are in the technical side of engineering, geotechnical may be the way to go. An engineer that is capable of bringing in more and more work is worth more than a fantastic technical engineer with little ability to bring in new work.

A geotechnical engineer that can do everything is worth a lot to a lot of companies.

My Thoughts On Being A Geotechnical Engineer

I did a coop in university at a structural firm. I spent every day sitting in a cubicle doing calculations and reading design guidelines. I hated it.

When I tried geotechnical engineering, I loved it. I got to go outside, talk to people, work with a diverse range of other professions, and work on many different types of projects in different industries. At the beginning of my career I would say I spent 90% of my time out of the office. 4 years in, I probably spend 75% of my time in the office. It was a gradual change.

Now, I generally get to set my own schedule, visit sites when I need to, find my own work, and keep myself busy.

The field of geotechnical engineering is not well respected and is not highly paid. Despite this I have enjoyed being a geotechnical engineer, and I know I like it better than being in structural.

If you enjoy the freedom to leave the office when you want to check up on a site, doing fieldwork (sometimes for extended periods), working with contractors, and having a varied set of responsibilities – I think a career in geotechnical is not a bad choice.

That is not to say it doesn’t come with downsides however. Long hours, low pay, and little respect to name a few. (I don’t really care about respect from engineers in other fields).

The biggest downside to geotechnical engineering for me is that there is little you can do with the skill, except geotechnical engineering. You can’t apply it to much of anything, except.. the soil, and big projects. You can’t have a geotechnical project you work on at him in your spare time.

For me, that is the biggest downside. If I could do it again, I would go with software engineering. Learning to code would have allowed me to work on projects on my own time for my enjoyment, to advance my knowledge, and to possibly monetize my personal work. And that’s really not something you can do as a geotechnical engineer.