Career change help

Give some more details such as your state of residence. Many posters here will have info about your best options.
States require degree requirements in various forms plus experience.
There are many programs available, maybe you are in proximity to one of them. Plus there are online degrees as an option.

Ditto. Every State is unique in some way. The PE won't get you a PLS but it will help in some places. Give us an idea of where you want to work and help will be along soon.. good luck

Rusty Shackleford, post: 325454, member: 10158 wrote: -I don’t have the slightest clue as to what type of salary I could ask for (I’m in the southeast U.S). I know it will be a pay cut and I’m fine with that. However, I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot and go too low. Perhaps the engineering background accounts for something?

Slow down there Dale. I think you ask if they're hiring first then you find out what they're paying.

Rusty Shackleford, post: 325454, member: 10158 wrote: Hi everyone! I just found this site yesterday and have been quite impressed with the community here. So my first post is really a set of questions.
I’m currently working as a PE after getting a BS in Civil Engineering and working for 4 years. Unfortunately, I’ve determined I’m on the wrong career path. Had I known I would be glued to a computer monitor 40+ hours a week, I would have gone a different route. Of course this was my own doing by getting the degree and staying put for so long but I’ve decided now is the time to break away. I’m not getting any younger and I don’t have kids yet.

Luckily, I had the opportunity to work as a rodman for 3 months during an internship. I always look back to that experience as the moment I realized what I really should do for work. I crave the outdoor elements on a daily basis (even before the office work), have kept in great shape, enjoy working with numbers, and really feel like land surveying is the career path I want to shift toward. I have a great deal of respect for the profession and something about it has been calling me ever since.

OK, so for the questions…

-Should I go back to school first before attempting to get on with a survey crew? The alternate option was to get on with a crew first and take night classes. Any thoughts?

-I don’t have the slightest clue as to what type of salary I could ask for (I’m in the southeast U.S). I know it will be a pay cut and I’m fine with that. However, I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot and go too low. Perhaps the engineering background accounts for something?

-I would like to become licensed a soon as possible. Any opinions on the Associates degree versus the Bachelors route? My state requires a surveying specific degree and won’t accept an engineering degree (probably best considering the differences).

Thank you very much in advance!!

Rusty,

Welcome to the neighborhood!

My suggestion, for whatever it's worth, would be to evaluate your current experience. If you currently qualify to sit for the PE, personally, I would do that, and get that under my belt. I would then look at possible employment opportunities with surveying firms, and see what is available.

You did not mention what state you live in, but there are many surveying education opportunities out there. Great Basin College is an option, University of Wyoming has a Surveying Certificate program that is respected. Many two year colleges have surveying programs.

My suggestion on obtaining the PE is that it can possibly open doors for you down the road, and you never know what lies in your future. Being a solo operator, I see opportunities that, if I was also an engineer, I could diversify, and enter into other avenues of generating revenue for my business. You always want to leverage yourself to me as valuable as you can be to either your employer, or most importantly, yourself.

I have been in this honorable profession 20 years, became licensed in 2001, and opened my own business in 2007. I cannot see myself doing anything else. I am currently licensed in 5 states. I wish I had planned a little better in the beginning as far as education goes, but I kinda "fell into" surveying, and never looked back. I had no idea what surveying was when I started college, and wanted to become a mechanical engineer. I got a job with a local civil engineering firm doing land development work, and the rest is history. I fell in love with the work, and here I am 20 years later.

I wish you the best of luck. This is a great profession.

Jimmy

Rusty Shackleford, post: 325454, member: 10158 wrote: Hi everyone! I just found this site yesterday and have been quite impressed with the community here. So my first post is really a set of questions.
I’m currently working as a PE after getting a BS in Civil Engineering and working for 4 years. Unfortunately, I’ve determined I’m on the wrong career path. Had I known I would be glued to a computer monitor 40+ hours a week, I would have gone a different route. Of course this was my own doing by getting the degree and staying put for so long but I’ve decided now is the time to break away. I’m not getting any younger and I don’t have kids yet.

Luckily, I had the opportunity to work as a rodman for 3 months during an internship. I always look back to that experience as the moment I realized what I really should do for work. I crave the outdoor elements on a daily basis (even before the office work), have kept in great shape, enjoy working with numbers, and really feel like land surveying is the career path I want to shift toward. I have a great deal of respect for the profession and something about it has been calling me ever since.

OK, so for the questions…

-Should I go back to school first before attempting to get on with a survey crew? The alternate option was to get on with a crew first and take night classes. Any thoughts?

-I don’t have the slightest clue as to what type of salary I could ask for (I’m in the southeast U.S). I know it will be a pay cut and I’m fine with that. However, I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot and go too low. Perhaps the engineering background accounts for something?

-I would like to become licensed a soon as possible. Any opinions on the Associates degree versus the Bachelors route? My state requires a surveying specific degree and won’t accept an engineering degree (probably best considering the differences).

Thank you very much in advance!!

I have found that in Texas in the big cities, most RPLS make about same if not more than most Civil Engineers. Now going from a PE to rodman or instrument man yes you will take a big pay cut. Maybe you could get a job at a compnay that has an Engineering and Survey Dept, and go out with the Survey Crew to do "field engineering checks".

Some states if you have a PE they will almost give you a Survey License. I dont know if you need to go back to school, taking a legal class on surveying would help. It really depends on the State you are in or the State you want to get a license in.

Take the SIT test, you will need it anyways, get it out of the way.

How are Hank, Peggy and Bobby getting along these days? Haven't seen any of the old gang lately. Are you still killing bugs for fun and profit?

Find a job first, maybe a smaller firm that could utilize your skills inside as well as outside.

Just an observation but seems like most surveyors find a niche that they will specialize in. With that in mind, seek out a starting position in surveying that will make the most of your existing skill set, with care of course not to find yourself back in the same predicament bound to the office. I've found a good balance of both works well for me. Passing the LSIT would be a good start as already mentioned.
Good luck!

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

What State are you currently in? PA is a good one to do what you want to do. A Civil Engineering grad with 10 Surveying credits can take the LSIT and then the PLS. But PA wants good years of boundary line field experience.

Other states can get you into a PLS with a BS degree and little or no experience. There are 95 colleges or community college programs in the US. A few are simply certificate programs, 15 credits, half are AS programs 24-30 credits and the rest BS programs 30-42 credits. A certificate can get you to the test in some states. Generally the more surveying education you have the less experience you need.

You can easily gobble up 12 credits (4 courses) online while working in less than a year. That can get you to the fundamentals exam. Many states want you to have the fundamentals (LSIT) before they count your surveying experience.

You do not have to be a PA resident to qualify.

Paul in PA

Go ahead and get your PE license right away if you haven't already.
Get a job with an engineering/surveying firm and request, if not demand, field work. You'll get to see both sides of the fence so to speak without fences being involved. 🙂
My background is software engineering and mathematics and physics. Somehow I got snarled into surveying. In a few months I was running the instrument and data collector.
Bringing the data to the engineers was sometimes/often interesting. Especially when road grades were involved and being involved while the graders were on site. That's simple trig I learned in high school almost 30 years ago. Giving the road-builder a cut and fill here and there was a no brainer for on the spot. They weren't building the road where the engineers planned it. I kept telling the head engineer this and finally one day he decides to come out in the field with us.
Somehow or another in between those months of work, I sort of became a defacto liaison between the land owner, road-builder and engineer.
The engineer finally comes out with us one day with all his nice plans. A lot is not where he planned it. He depended his data based on flyover data and not eyeballs on the ground.
Once he got there he finally admitted to me/us, "they ground doesn't 'look' like that data I have". I re-iterated I'd been trying to tell him that for months.
He did admit that he was actually to get out the field again.

In the end he admitted to me and my party-chief must have stuck between 2 hard spots trying to satisfy both parties. One of my last days on that project was simply to give the road-builder a grades (and maybe some cut-fills) to meet county code without a variance. We took plenty of shots and me and my PC were heading out for lunch. I'm sitting in the truck telling Tony I can give him everything he needs just using the data collector and proceeded to do so. (No one else was around).

Being a green-horn to this profession at the time I told all about that in complete seemingly innocence on my part. On another forum and was immediately excoriated for practicing engineering without a license. Being also a carpenter at the time, my reply was "what's the difference in a carpenter calculating his own measurements of rise and runs?

I'm rambling once again...... sorry.
E

Jimmy Cleveland, post: 325526, member: 91 wrote: Rusty,

Welcome to the neighborhood!

My suggestion, for whatever it's worth, would be to evaluate your current experience. If you currently qualify to sit for the PE, personally, I would do that, and get that under my belt. I would then look at possible employment opportunities with surveying firms, and see what is available.

You did not mention what state you live in, but there are many surveying education opportunities out there. Great Basin College is an option, University of Wyoming has a Surveying Certificate program that is respected. Many two year colleges have surveying programs.

My suggestion on obtaining the PE is that it can possibly open doors for you down the road, and you never know what lies in your future. Being a solo operator, I see opportunities that, if I was also an engineer, I could diversify, and enter into other avenues of generating revenue for my business. You always want to leverage yourself to me as valuable as you can be to either your employer, or most importantly, yourself.

I have been in this honorable profession 20 years, became licensed in 2001, and opened my own business in 2007. I cannot see myself doing anything else. I am currently licensed in 5 states. I wish I had planned a little better in the beginning as far as education goes, but I kinda "fell into" surveying, and never looked back. I had no idea what surveying was when I started college, and wanted to become a mechanical engineer. I got a job with a local civil engineering firm doing land development work, and the rest is history. I fell in love with the work, and here I am 20 years later.

I wish you the best of luck. This is a great profession.

Jimmy

Great advice Jimmy....the time ran out for me, I had 5 years to sit for the eit but life caught up right in the middle of the 2008 crunch....Rusty get your PE! Then go exploring!

Good decision, as far as changing from an office environment to field. As many have said, get your PE first. It opens up so many more options for the future that will be closed to you if you don't have your certification.

The best advice is go to a large firm, find a PLS (or PSM, or whatever is called for in your state) and a PE that both work there, and offer to buy them dinner in exchange for picking their brains. Explain what you want to do, and how you want to set your sails for the future. Listen to what they tell you.

I know one guy in a similar situation, was a cubicle critter for a while, then started his own business. The 'AhHa' moment occurred after his business folded and he had to hustle to make the mortgage payment. This was 2008, nobody was hiring, so he created his own niche market. Engineering topos at a third of what the big firms were charging, did both field and design himself, and soon had more work than he could handle alone. The key to making that happen was, he had the PE certs already.

These days he works for a large utility company as their Jack of all trades, works in the field with robotics and GPS two thirds of the week, spends the rest in climate controlled luxury where he then puts the data into a usable GIS format that has already paid for itself many times over. He told me they were initially reluctant to hire him, but made the case they would have in house engineering as well as a field tech to acquire the data.

Now here is the cautionary tale. I had many opportunities over the years to advance, and didn't. Today, while I love love love what I do for a living, find the summers are getting hotter, the hills are getting steeper, and it is taking longer to bounce back from the minor aches and pains of field work. Don't be that guy.