A few years ago, I had a conversation with a water and wastewater engineer in Texas. We stayed loosely connected, but we had not spoken in about three years when he reached back out to me a couple of months ago. Apparently, I made a decent...
In my nearly 30 years of recruiting civil engineering professionals, this is one of the tightest candidate markets I have ever seen. To be fair, I feel like I say some version of that almost every year. Seriously. Finding experienced civil engineers has never been easy. The...
A couple of weeks ago, our entire family got together in Bethany Beach, Delaware, for our annual vacation. It is one of my favorite weeks of the year. While we were sitting on the beach one afternoon, we started laughing about my two youngest nephews. They are...
A lot of civil engineers say they want to become an Office Leader or Office Principal someday. That makes sense. Those roles often come with more authority, more influence, more compensation, and the opportunity to shape the direction of a team or market. But there is a part...
Yesterday, I was talking with a candidate who recently accepted an offer from one of our clients. During the conversation, he mentioned something that caught my attention. His company had brought in a new Regional Director for Water/Wastewater a few months earlier. This person had been in...
I talk to a lot of civil engineers who find themselves in this exact spot. Their title says Project Engineer. But in reality, they are already functioning much more like an Assistant Project Manager—or even a full Project Manager. They are coordinating with clients. They are managing large portions...