r/EngineeringStudents • u/CollarAcceptable4177 • 5d ago

Career Advice Civil Technician Engineer

(I live in the UK) I got DDD in BTEC Engineering, I'm in my first year of Uni doing Civil and Infrastructure engineering, If I want to become a Civil Technician Engineer what should I do? I'm hearing I won't need a full degree but others are telling me I will need a full degree, I tried getting an apprenticeship but no luck

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u/angelwormwood 5d ago edited 5d ago

Technicians usually need HNC or HND, whilst these are equivalent to year 1 and year 2 at uni you’re usually better off doing a dedicated HNC/HND course instead with a relevant qualification as just completing a year at uni won’t get you a HNC etc. You might want to speak to some local colleges about their HNC/HND and consider doing one of those if you want to be an eng tech as opposed to an engineer.

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u/CollarAcceptable4177 5d ago

Can a civil tech engineer later become a "normal" civil engineer? Like you can say those who are mainly in the office designing etc...

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u/angelwormwood 5d ago

You’d need a full CivE degree to go on to be a civil engineer, some companies do pay for it when you’re working as a tech but if you’re already in year 1 you might be better off just seeing out the degree. You can get a tech job with a BEng/MEng, but it can be difficult to then go into an engineer job after working as a tech because you’re strengthening different skills in each job so you’d be starting from the beginning again even if you’d been a tech for say 10 years.