Logic suggests that there are two main ways to help solve the civil engineering workforce crisis: attract more civil engineers and better train the ones you have to work more effectively.
The 2025 ASCE Civil Engineering Education Summit, held this summer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, tackled both angles. More than 125 civil engineering academic and industry leaders gathered with three main objectives:
- Identify the top five technical skills civil engineers need to harness technology, create innovative solutions, and solve our most pressing problems.
- Identify the top five professional skills civil engineers need to meet the future needs of the industry.
- Identify the top five outreach strategies to attract the next generation of civil engineers.
The discussions around technical skills covered not only undergraduate curricula but also learning on the job during a young engineer’s first five years in the field. Summit participants also developed change commitments to incorporate these skills into curricula and early-career development plans for civil engineers.
The consensus list of essential technical skills reflects rapidly changing times in the industry. Certainly, these are not the same skills that featured at similar education summits a decade ago.
The summit’s top five technical skills civil engineers need:
1. AI in civil engineering practice
- Integration of AI into practice, including ethics, quality control, and verification.
- Begin introducing concepts in the first two undergraduate years, with advanced application later.
2. Working with uncertainty
- Addressing parameter variability, modeling limitations, extreme events, and safety factors.
- Recommended for upper-level undergraduate and graduate instruction with immediate integration.
3. Sensing
- Verification of collected data and evaluation of its reliability.
- Introduce in the first two undergraduate years – another urgent need.
4. User-centered and universal design
- Expanding tools and training for faculty and developing faculty champions.
- Increasing cross-disciplinary collaboration beyond engineering to improve accessibility and inclusivity in design.
- Embedded throughout the undergraduate curriculum.
5. Visualization for communication and concept development
- Leveraging visual tools to convey ideas and refine designs.
- Introduced early in the curriculum (possibly before college).
“I believe the summit participants got it right when they identified AI in civil engineering practice as one of the biggest technical skills gaps,” said Juan M. Caicedo, Ph.D., M.ASCE, professor and chair of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of South Carolina and a participant in the ASCE Education Summit.
“It is hard to argue that AI isn’t changing the way that work and education are done. And this is AI in general – the LLMs (large language models) that most of us are using, and specialized civil engineering software that will be infused with AI. Just as the skills of engineers changed when personal computers came to the forefront of design, the skills that engineers are going to need are going to change.”
Artificial intelligence and evolving technology were fairly obvious inclusions on a list of essential skills for literally any profession in 2025. What may have caught more people by surprise was the group’s highlighting of universal design as an essential technical skill.
“I feel like that’s a whole area of design theology that we have tended to ignore,” Edwin Nagy, Ph.D., P.E., M.ASCE, principal lecturer of civil engineering at the University of Maine and another summit participant.
“I started as an engineer in the late ’90s, and we were expected to think about the environment, but our undergraduate training did not specifically include anything about the environment. And so engineering was still coming to grips at that time with the fact that ‘Oh, environmental considerations are important.’ I feel like we are now in that same boat with societal equity and universal or accessible design. It’s something that the engineering industry realizes is important, but the people working in the field never got any training on it, and the faculty teaching the next generation never got any training on it. So we have a bit of a ‘bootstrap issue’ of ‘How are we going to start training people to do this whole area of universal design?’ It’s not what we normally think of as technical, but it’s absolutely a design theology.
“So that to me was the one on that list that really stuck out as interesting and difficult and important. And I see it as part of a pattern. When engineering changes in major ways, how do we get the educators to be able to educate the new engineers?”
Like it or not, change is clearly the name of the game for civil engineering educators – a group that, to be charitable, hasn’t traditionally relished upheaval. Caicedo sees it all as a positive challenge, though.
“My grandfather knew how to use a slide rule, but I today do not need this skill because of the availability of calculators and computers,” Caicedo said. “I see a lot of opportunities for innovation as the work of a civil engineer gets infused with AI.
“How can an engineer get the most out of LLM- or AI-infused software? How can we train engineers to know when the software is not giving a reasonable answer? There are many new questions that I believe we will be wrestling with in the next few years.
“These questions also create significant opportunities for innovation in both practice and education. This is an exciting time to be in civil engineering.”
Learn more about the ASCE Education Summit.
Explore ASCE’s resources for workforce development.
