comprising planning, geography, science and theenvironment. Such diverse backgrounds provide anideal wealth of wider knowledge, characteristic of a civilengineer.Such a wide background available to civil engineersnot only enables them to successfully grapple withthe challenges of co-ordinating specialists but it alsomeans that their own individual specialisms may betaken from a far broader spectrum. Significantly, asmajor infrastructure projects are getting bigger andmore complex, with a seemingly ever-increasingrange of specialist disciplines, the co-ordination andintegration often (at least in terms of engineering) fallsto the civil engineer, making use of their broad-basedskills. Often labelled as project managers, these civilengineers have a broad breadth of experience that isfrequently tested as an expert.The overall educational standard for engineers is asubject in which I have become increasingly involvedwith over recent years. My involvement with the UKEngineering Council, Joint Board of Moderators andInternational Engineering Alliance particularly withaccreditation of university courses both in the UKand overseas, has enabled me to appreciate the linkbetween the demands of society/industry and theuniversity curriculum.The construction industry is changing rapidly notleast due to issues such as sustainability, healthand safety etc., but also in the context of emergingtechnology with the increasing development ofcomputer software including BIM and most excitingly,AI. In my view, AI will not only impact design andconstruction but will inevitably need to be embraced byexpert witnesses and indeed the courts.My involvement with engineering education has alsogiven me an insight into how civil engineering can bereasonably categorised under four main headings, eachof which covers several sub-disciplines. I summarisethis in the following table and in the absence of anythingmore definitive commend its use in demonstrating therange of skills that fall under civil engineering.Of course, the disciplines / sub-disciplines showncan be further sub-divided, for example a highwaysexpert may have chosen to specialise in pavement oralignments or lighting. It follows that a civil engineeringexpert can be expected to have specialised in one (ormore) of the discipline skills shown with a generalistmore likely to have their knowledge and experiencespread across a far greater number of disciplines/subdisciplines. These specialisms within disciplines seemto me to be very similar to the way that a structuralengineering expert may have chosen to specialise in,say, the design of high-rise building within seismiczones.16
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