How can I face interview as a civil engineer?

Treat the interview as a mutually beneficial conversation: be polite, be professional but, above all, be yourself.

Construction, engineering and surveying interviewers are typically senior members of the team you’d be joining, and they are looking to find out more about you. Are you someone whom they could safely send to client meetings straight away? Would you fit well in a multidisciplinary project team? Can you get things done? If you have a related degree, do you know your stuff?

Part of the way in which you can answer these questions is in how you treat the interview: see it as a respectful conversation rather than a grilling.

Don’t be afraid to ask them questions or ask their opinions. The interview is as much for you to work out whether you’d get on with the employer as it is the other way around.

Types of graduate construction, civils and surveying interviews

The most common types of interviews are:

• telephone (sometimes used by recruiters as a first interview)

• face-to-face, based around competencies and your CV

• technical.

You can expect to be asked about your skills and attributes, why you want the job, your understanding of the industry and your career aspirations.

Apart from HR questions,

If you have a built environment degree or are going for an engineering job, expect to face some questions on your technical knowledge – how you apply basic principles to a work-based situation. This might involve a formal technical interview, a technical exercise, a presentation or some technical questions within a more general interview.

‘In a technical interview, we want to know whether you can apply the theory from your degree course in the real world,’ says Aman Rai, part of the graduate recruitment team at Arup. ‘We may ask you to come up with a solution to a problem and then ask you what would happen if we changed the design in a particular way.’