Civil Engineering is an Avenue for Entrepreneurship

Preamble:

Though the meaning and concept of entrepreneur is the same from long years but the opportunity of being an entrepreneur have changed as day’s progress. It requires proper planning, ability, quality, mind set up, a little luck and a source of capital for being an entrepreneur. Currently from a survey it is revealed that there are more than 580 million entrepreneurs in this world.

Civil Engineering is a sector where a bunch of business opening can be planned if the knowledge of entrepreneurship become broadly extends. Civil Engineers can drive their own business as an entrepreneur. But a good start is often not results a happily future in this field because risk of breakdown in future, additional competition in marketplace and asymmetrical working timetable are top three obstacles seen in any start-up business curriculum. So, besides of proper planning, scheduling of work is also a very essential aspect to get success in this field.

A Brief about Entrepreneurship in Civil Engineering

Basically, Entrepreneurship is the capability and willingness to form, arrange and conduct a business activity along with any of its suspicions in order to craft earnings. The most outstanding paradigm of entrepreneurship is the opening of fresh businesses. Hence, it is defined as someone who has the knack and yearning to set up, oversee, and thrive in a start-up enterprise along with risk having with it, to make benefits. In Civil Engineering, entrepreneurship associated with land, workers at various level, natural assets and capital that can make a benefit in terms of revenue. Some job roles as an entrepreneur in this branch of engineering are given below:

  • Building Planner: There is a huge demand of a building planner before construction of any residential, public or organisational concern. So in this regard requirement of license building planner is noticeable. Those who completed the Bachelor Degree in Civil Engineering can get this license by applying for the same to the local Municipality.
  • Civil Contractor and Sub-contractor: Civil contractor are referred as person or organization appoints by clients for carry out and completion of works on scheduled time period. Seeing the majority and importance of work contractor can hire a noteworthy number of subcontractors implicated with different job roles.
  • Consultant: Consultants may be from any specialization of this core branch. They are self-governing and proficient engineers who can present their thoughts in making a well detailed service as per client’s requirement and financial capability.
  • Quantity Surveyor: They are mainly responsible for controlling cost of a civil project. They also accountable for estimation and valuation of the project in terms of monetary and volume of material required in the project.
  • Material Supplier: Material is an indispensable part of any business enterprise related to civil construction. Material supplier is a person or organisation who supplies material to the sites as per the requirement of the design.
  • Labour Contractor: This is a person or enterprise that supplies workers to the employer for a specific time period in the construction site and for this work they charge a fee from the employer.
  • Real Estate Marketing Agent: They give direction and assist merchants and customers for advertising and acquiring any property at a precise worth under the finest provisions. By comparing current market status they can also estimate the value of the property and give suggestion by overseeing the financial capability of the client.
  • Surveyor: Need of private surveyor is crucial for determining the site boundaries and its quantity. For a new under constructed site, they work incessantly to find out the earthwork excavation and location and volume of cutting and filling.

Required Pre-Qualifiers for Entrepreneurship

Making of decision to get started in this field of entrepreneurship it pushes an employee to play some sort of roles during their path of journey. Besides of educational status of a person, some pre-qualifiers also help them to move forward along with their field.

Pre-Qualifier:

Generally, to start a career as an apprentice in this field it is required to get at least a high school graduate degree but it is not so essential for all the time beings. Besides of that, some of the following skills should be present to get success in this field.

  • Strong Common Sense: Behavioural skills frequently fall under the general heading of good spirit, sociability, maturity, or common sense. These are skills that must be cultured and practiced in order to enhance career viewpoint.
  • Positive Attitude: Being optimistic and gracious to others helps in delighting job more. A strong positive attitude should be present to compete with widespread marketplace.
  • Vision: The qualities of a good entrepreneur include a well vision setting, captivating others, liability, and developing situations where they can utilize their strengths and reveal creativity.
  • Honesty and Dedication: This explains assurance to the associates including client as well as owners, subcontractors, vendors and the community. Entrepreneurs must be dedicated to work, respecting everyone’s console and maintaining a general agenda for treading with achievement of the work.
  • Professional Ethics: In the entrepreneurship, ethics has to extend at both professional and organisational height. Professionals such planner, engineers and surveyors have moral codes to support as behoves their profession, as do organisations. Ethical behaviour is often considered by the scale of reliability and integrity with which companies carry out business.
  • Management Skills and Teamwork: Entrepreneurship as a teamwork requires contribution towards accomplishing the project, but there may also have contradictory priorities during the teamwork. Aligning these priorities, implementation a project on time and fund management needs suitable management skills and collaboration from all participants.
  • Courage to face Challenge: Entrepreneurship requires leadership and determination of facing challenges during complicated times. Challenges include completion of work on time, work as a unit to reach towards achieving goal.

Final Words for Future Entrepreneurs:

Starting a career as an entrepreneur needs a lot of tough work, but it is undeniably not impossible. The proper amount of drive, attentiveness, and start-up capital will permit to fabricate a successful business in civil engineering from the primary phase. It is going to take four principles to turn into a great entrepreneur.

  • Have a Strong Business Plan: Before its implementation, a business plan is a practice by which an entrepreneur can figure out the viability of the plan along with the possible major obstacles and also its probable overcome techniques.
  • Equipment and Licenses: To initiate a personal business, construction equipments and tools are one of the parts of it. Even a small time contractor has to require a lot of money to acquire tools, licenses, IT equipment, and vehicles to get to job sites. License issued by local Municipal Corporation is very essential to get any contract in this field.
  • Insurance: General liability insurance will look after the worksite injuries, accidents, and other unexpected occurrences. Entrepreneur can also look into property insurance concerning for something gets stolen or broken. It is better to have at least some economic assist in the moment of a stolen computer or forklift repair.
  • Marketing: Advertising requirements are as straightforward as signage for the job sites. Radio, TV, and online marketing, like a websites and blogs are the appropriate medium for marketing. It is also required to generate a logo to set up brand. Other suggested promotional items contain business cards, brochures, and, ultimately, a business portfolio.

An Insight of Career Perspectives in Construction Industry

Preamble:

Building Construction have always been admired career options for students. Abundant varieties of skills are required for construction industry which implies portentous career perspectives. The career paths of budding engineers can be diversified once they specialized in their area of interest. Large opportunities are there in construction industry to make a start-up company and become boss for their own business. This industry exhibits different forms of career paths covering various aspects of construction activities. A statistical study says that 4 million skilled Civil Engineers are required to complete the roll-out project available in the market. Here let’s try to get a glimpse out of this in detail.

Career Opportunities – A Review:

The construction industry is partitioned into two sectors- (i) Construction of Housing, Institutional and Commercial Buildings and (ii) Infrastructural Development.

  1. Housing, Institutional and Commercial Buildings

Residential, Institutional and Commercial buildings are the major parts of construction in the globe. Due to its comprehensive presence and equally grandiose job opportunities residential construction is usually appraised as a separate sector. Opportunities of working on mighty construction projects for renowned companies are available in this sector. Always there is a greater opportunity for growth in construction sector for the young and dynamic engineer who is ready work hard and smart; from a humble junior engineer to a project head. Apart from this there is wide spectrum of opportunities are there in the field of maintenance, repair, and rehabilitation area. We all know that the Commercial, entertainment and institutional buildings are accountable for the economic and social well being development. Hence huge jobs are there also for construction. Let us put forth straight like this,  whatever may be the project either it may be housing, commercial, health, educational and industrial, nearly 60 percent of the total budgeted investment need to be spent for constructing operational building. The abovementioned opportunities are demand knowledgeable people in the areas of designing, detailing, supervising, estimating, managing and controlling the projects. The detailed job requisites are listed below.

  • Planning Engineer: The role of a planning engineer is to prepare the time schedule of the project and fix the target date of completion of different activities.
  • Structural Consultant: Provide technical guidance on secure designs and construction. They obtain planning and/or building regulations sanction and investigate configurations of the basic components of a structure.
  • Quantity Surveyor: The quantity surveyor is liable for estimating the costs, materials, and labour required to accomplish a project. They competent enough to use relevant software and very much able to communicate with the site engineers in terms of cost of construction.
  • Building Information Modelling (BIM) Analysts: The role of the BIM Analyst is to carry out analyses and simulations based on the BIM model (US GSA, 2009), e.g., building performance study, circulation and security examination. This specialist can work in Drafting and Design Firms, and also as a Design Consultant.
  • Site Engineer: The role site engineer as a mediator between the field workers and the management office to ascertain effective communication. Apart from this, they are liable for any problems or conflicts that may come up between the field and the office.
  • Construction Manager: The job of the construction manager is to plan, operate, lead and control the construction project to mange time and cost. They are the key persons in the organization to formulate strategic planning, managing and controlling of men, machine, and materials involved in the construction project.
  • Procurement Engineer: The job of procurement engineer is to purchase materials, equipments and other service requirements for successful construction operation. Their essential skill-sets are to recognize quality materials, equipments and the relevant suppliers who will provide those with optimal cost to the company.
  • Maintenance Engineer: Maintenance Engineers are liable for the fixing and maintenance of industrial equipment and existing buildings. They perform routine equipment safeguarding, troubleshoot issues, and make onsite maintenance when required.
  • Safety Engineer: He is the in-charge for preparing safety rules and regulation of the job site to provide safety to all. He is responsible for monitoring and controlling labours health and safety at work place.
  1. Infrastructural Development:

The construction of roads, bridges, railways, airports, harbour, water, sewer, power sectors, oil and gas pipe lines all are covered under one umbrella called infrastructures. All of us knew that different central and state government schemes are announced in the budget for infrastructural projects, especially 100 smart cities have been identified and the project is in development stage which unveiling abundant career opportunities and high-paying jobs in planning, operation, maintenance and control. This highly expensive massive scale projects will take several years to get completed and requires hard working and committed employees who even work under difficult situations. These projects are real job providers for Civil Engineering students for numerous years, but one must ready to work flexible enough across the geographic boundary and time. The job profiles included in this sector are:

  • Design Engineer: He is the key person in industry who is responsible for new strategies, creating new avenues for business, products and systems.
  • Highway Engineer: Highway engineers are specialized in building highways and calculate total funding of the project. They explore new machines and technology, new pavement designs, and enhanced maintenance operations. This research is the origin for well-planned and well-built highways.
  • Sanitary Engineer: Sanitary engineers are involved in the projects such as water and waste water treatment, composting wastes to produce fertilizer and energy recovery from the waste materials by following regulatory norms of the government bodies.
  • Quality Controller: A quality control engineer is responsible for planning, extending and executing the quality management systems in the construction sector. 

How to Get Started for this Dream Career?

There are multiple of courses being referred at college level which can mould a beginner for a career in construction. A 4-year Civil Engineering Programme can be pursued in a university by keeping into mind the future prospect of the course. Further specialization Courses like Structural Engineering, Construction Engineering and Management, Environmental Engineering, Transportation Engineering, Geo Technical Engineering, and Smart Infrastructures can be beneficial in this regard. While pursuing these courses, internship with leading general builders and core branch engineering companies may give a good grasp for future running.

On a Concluding Note:

The field of construction is a chief employment originator. It promotes the society during economic recession. So choosing a career in this field or being a part of this field is very praiseworthy. With an appropriate perception of the industry and the various amenities it provides aspirants, those undeniably have an affluent and worthwhile career.

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