As of May 2019, I will have finished my two-year Graduate position within SMEC Australia as a Geotechnical Engineer. Looking back, these past two years have been anything but easy. Being in this field is at times physically and mentally tolling, and the job constantly challenges you to think outside the box. While this in essence is true of many jobs, when I graduated in December 2016 from RMIT University, I had a very narrow understanding of the roles and responsibilities that was in this line of work. From speaking to peers and colleagues, a Civil Engineering degree at any Melbourne university tends to focus heavily around structures and materials. Because of this, I've decided to write an article on the basis of Geotechnical Engineering for any potential students thinking about getting into this field of work!
I can tell you wholeheartedly that a career in Geotechnical engineering can be extremely rewarding, not only lucratively, but also in terms of job satisfaction. You’ll get to travel to parts of this beautiful country that you otherwise may have never seen, gain vast amounts of management experience from a graduate level, and see more of a whole project life cycle than many other fields of Civil engineering. Even now, at the start of my career, I’ll drive down Hoddle Street and I’ll get so excited when I see a signboard that I performed the bored pile inspections for. It may seems trivial, but there’s not much else out there that makes me feel as proud!
I’d like to thank my family at SMEC Melbourne for always providing patience and support, even if that means letting me triple check things with them. I honestly believe that I have one of the best teams in the world, especially with our UNO and Nintendo Switch seshes, lunch-time runs and our sacred chicken sandwich Thursday's! A little-known fact is that SMEC Australia now has the largest Geotechnical team Australia-wide!
Pros:
-The potential for a higher salary as compared to many other streams of Civil engineering (PayScale);
-Higher potential for overtime pay or time off in lieu than other office based engineers;
-A bachelor’s degree in Civil engineering is most likely all you need to start your career, where in past you may have needed a Master’s degree or higher;
-Gets you out of the office and travel to new places (opportunity to work abroad);
-Physically and mentally stimulating career; and
-Be a part of a lot of the project lifecycle, from inception, project management, overseeing construction works and delivery.
Cons:
-Very physical at the start of your career, working in all weather conditions and time conditions;
-Long trips away from home (this one could be a pro);
-At times, unpredictable workload and long hours;
-Pressure at times from contractors to change design, scope or results on site;
-Higher risk in design as ground conditions are not known properties as compared to steel and concrete;
-You’ll always be the unsung hero as compared with the structural engineer/architect; and
-Your friends will still have no clue what you do so just show them this article.
1. What is Geotechnical Engineering?
Geotechnical engineering is a branch of Civil engineering which focuses on the engineering properties and behaviour of earth materials (soils and rock). The role of a Geotechnical engineer is to assess material properties, determined by performing site investigation works to confirm site subsurface conditions. From here, we use principles of soil and rock mechanics to determine the physical/mechanical and chemical properties of these materials. This is then utilized in; slope stability checks of natural or man-made slopes, earthwork and foundation construction, structural foundations, track formation of rail, retaining wall design. The list really goes on! If soil or rock is used within construction and infrastructure, it’s a good bet that a Geotechnical engineer has been involved in some facet!
2. You will most likely begin your career heavily on-site.
The industry norm for rookie Geotechnical engineers is to be placed straight away out on site to soak up as much experience as possible in Site Investigation works.
As a Geotech engineer, you’ll perform borehole drilling, test pitting or cone-penetration testing etc. to get an understanding of what the ground conditions of the site. Just pray that you aren’t hand-augering most of your holes! You’ll be logging what comes out of the ground to an Australian standard (AS1726:2017 Geotechnical site investigations), sampling soil and rock and performing on-site field tests (Pocket Penetrometer testing (PP), Shear-Vane testing, Dynamic Cone Penetration testing (DCP), Standard Penetration testing (SPT), Hammer testing and Rock Scratch testing etc.) to understand the in-situ quality (consistency/density/weathering/strength) of soil and rock. You’ll also record ground water conditions through the installation of wells for accurate groundwater measuring and sampling. Geotechnical engineers may also be scoped to perform environmental sampling which includes contamination sampling and in-situ testing with devices such as the photoionization detector (PIDs).
You may also be put in charge of observing excavations, bored and driven pile inspections, installation of soil nails or rock anchors, mapping rock faces, site classifications, seismic testing or electro resistivity testing etc. At SMEC, I’ve also been involved in Construction Phase Services (CPS) and CPS gives you a good in-site (yes, that pun was intentional) into Site engineering and Construction management if that’s something that you may want to pursue instead.
Downsides of site are that you’ll work in almost every condition; the wet and cold (try logging on wet paper), the hot 40-degree sun, or sea sick on a barge. Hours can be very long based on project time-frame, with long hours on the road so fatigue management becomes extremely important. The job also gets physical when you’re lifting heavy core tray samples full of rock, bulk bags of soil for California Bearing Ratio (CBR) testing or performing DCP’s (think an 8-kilogram weight that you constantly lift and drop). Rule of thumb, if something is more than 15 kg, get someone to help you lift it. Just do it. Plus, there’s usually nobody around that you’d need to impress anyway. That is unless you do want to get the attention of that 60-year-old driller. Hey, I don’t judge.
There may be weeks at a time of work which requires you to stay away from home, so it might be easier if you’re single or you don’t yet have children. On the plus though, you’ll get to see cool parts of the country with meals and accommodation all paid for. Every country town apparently has the best award-winning meat pie, so you’ll get to judge that along the way.
Getting a firm grip on site work is extremely beneficial for design, constructability, proposal cost estimation and for project management with time estimation.
It depends on the company, but I do know some engineers who have had no design exposure at 5-7 years’ experience as they are purely on-site engineers. It’s best to talk up-front with your employer how they plan to utilize you, and what career direction you want.
3. Site Management Experience
Often or not, you’ll be the only one out there running the show. That means overseeing, at times, multiple sub-contractors at once; traffic management, service locators, surveyors, drillers, non-destructive diggers, ecologists etc. You’ll get a great understanding of the Occupation Health and Safety (OH&S) requirements on site by running sub-contractors through Safe Working Method Statements (SWMS), pre-start and tool-box meetings, and completing Job Safety Analysis (JSA) cards. You’ll organize access for drill rigs, based on surrounding environment and existing services, position boreholes and contact the local farmer to remove your driller’s bogged vehicle in the farmers paddock with their tractor! Any hiccups that come up (and there will be something that usually goes wrong), you’ll be looked at for an answer. But don’t stress as there’s usually people back in the office to help you out with questions. That is if you have phone reception which reminds me to tell you to get Telstra if you’re from Victoria. Out there, it’s Telstra country and on a side-note, I’ve also got shares in Telstra so help me out here. Barring that, carry a satellite phone! Okay, I’ve gone off topic here.
4. Office work and Design work
So, you’ve been put in the office and for now escaped the heat/cold. Congratulations!
From here you’ll start learning how to write proposals, prepare Dial before you Dig (DBYD) plans for drilling works, preparing SWMS, entering in field logs into a logging software (usually gINT, HoleBASE SI or in-house), creating geological longitudinal sections, organizing laboratory testing schedules, creating test site location plans (TSLP), drafting in a CAD software from concepts toissued for construction drawings, report writing (factual and interpretive), proof engineering geotechnical designs, or responding to requests for information (RFIs) from clients.
You’ll also be organizing the scheduling of sub-contractors and making sure that the on-site engineers have everything they need when they rock up.
For design, you might use in-house spreadsheets, first principles, limit state equilibrium (Slope/W) and finite elemental method (Plaxis 2D) software to designl retaining walls, piles, pavement designs, foundations, slope stability, deep excavations, track formation for railways etc. The list really goes on here!
At SMEC, and during my secondment to VicRoads, I’ve been lucky in gaining a lot of exposure within the design side of Geotechnical engineering. This is not the industry norm however, and I consider myself extremely fortunate. Especially so young in my career.
A mentor of mine, Ali Khan, always reminds me of the Singapore Nicholl Highway collapse when teaching design software. It’s proof that if you don’t really understand the mathematics and formulas behind the software or spreadsheet, it could be extremely dangerous with the potential to take lives. In this case, the designer used a soil model which vastly over-estimated the soil strength. In that software, it’s one-click to change the soil model type, and if two or three different parameters were entered, the lives of four men could have potentially been saved.
This also remind you of the importance of getting site experience to back-up your design and fully understanding what you are producing. Geotechnical engineering has the highest safety factors for a reason due to the risk in Geotechnical Engineering at times being phenomenal. Therefore, a proper investigation program is paramount for reducing your risk. Thankfully, even at the senior levels, most companies always require someone in a higher position than you to review your work on-top of proof engineering.
5.Conclusion
Although I’ve typed an essay here, I feel like I've only barely scratched the surface of what it is to be a Geotechnical engineer. As a Geotechnical engineer, you will have an integral role in most projects, as every structure is meaningless without a good foundation!
Please feel free to message me with any questions about Geotechnical Engineering or contact me if you wish to pursue a career at SMEC. I’ll be happy to look at your CV, or alternatively if you need any geotechnical design or investigation works, I’m happy to meet up to discuss over coffee!
Keep in mind, these views are coming from that of a consultancy perspective! The field is much broader then just this!
Thanks for reading this article. If you've made it this far, I really hope that it helped broaden your understanding of Geotechnical engineering!
Have a gneiss day!
-Stirling
