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Structural Engineering Career Advice - · Acedra
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0:00
so we're just again here in LA on the second part of my trip as we're going through to Italy and London [Music] hey look where I found hey what's up Alfred making YouTube video
0:22
put that here yes
0:27
I got a dead cat from me so hey man fancy meeting you in L.A yeah where I live man it's been good nice sunny weather it's been pretty good weather this week so I've been in La for about a week now so what have you been up to you know I get my life back together after testing exams uh yeah I get in my work-life balance in place after uh grueling exams now I can get back to YouTube get back to getting healthy and yeah just going out there having more fun after if you know it feels like
1:00
you're in school again after you've taken those exams and you're brains fried but now you're doing that mid-career so now that it's over I can relax and get myself back in check and get back to normal yeah as it finally feel to pass all your exams uh it's been great it's a really cool achievement I think for me because it's it's a long-term Structural Engineering goal for me so getting that uh test out of the way hopefully that's the last test I'm ever going to take in
1:28
terms of like exams and whatnot so huge accomplishments and I'm really glad it's over and now I can get back on with my life and it's definitely helped me out a lot too in terms of the technical knowledge but it did take a while so after graduating has your role changed at your current company yes uh from graduating it's been you know doing all the technical stuff first but then getting more and more into project management throughout the years and working with different types of building
1:57
materials and different types of contractors Architects building types now it's become more of a management role where I do take the lead on managing the projects and having a team of Engineers help me out on more of the technical stuff but also training those new Engineers to where needed to and uh taking at least the SC exam for me that's definitely helped out you know increase your your technical knowledge so you can help about the other Engineers as well so you're really
2:26
finding enjoying better to teach the engineers a bit more obviously with your YouTube channel that's something you're doing outwardly as well but it's something that you can now bring into your career as a person yeah I think for me I think we can do a better job of teaching students about Structural Engineering I know some schools do it but I think if it was more broader more practical that I think students could see what the actual Structural Engineering industry is like
2:52
because when I first started Structural Engineering it was all math and to me it was really theoretical and I was like yeah but then when I actually talked to some of the engineers and that were actually working in structural engineering and seeing what the actual designs entailed and the actual calculations that they do for the design that became a lot more fun like working Project based and not doing a whole lot a bunch of derivations it was more hey we got these equations we got these
3:17
loads find the loads solve this puzzle of load pass and to me that was fun but you don't really get to see that until you're actually working in the industry or talking to an actual structural engineer just your understanding your structural mechanics becomes even more as you start to work and get more of that practical side in which university sometimes depending on where you take it doesn't necessarily give you that they normally give you the basics but not
3:41
necessarily that full understanding that sometimes takes time yeah and you do need the basics for sure like everyone needs Statics and load path and strength of materials and mechanics but once you learn all those it becomes a lot more funner I guess those are your tools to solve those engineering puzzles and that's when it becomes fun when you're actually using it for a practical purpose instead of just deriving equations yeah that's what the things that I'll use the most is my Basics I'll
4:10
use it day in day out even for the most complex stuff structures aren't that complicated and once you actually start to understand the beauty Beauty and simplicity of that it makes engineering so much easier and so much more enjoyable and I think as Engineers we love to solve those problems day in day out yeah I think one of them was when you look at those complicated structures like those suspension bridges Golden Gate bridge and then things like that you'll notice like hey their their shape
4:36
is just a moment diagram and that's not by accident it's by Design and then when all that stuff comes together it's like oh it's okay it's just Aesthetics problem civil Statics problem on the higher level for sure boy the other one I've also found from University is them not teaching you how to look at drawings how to draw drawings and like because most of our job day in day out is talking to a builder or someone that doesn't have that technical knowledge and trying to put that advice
5:03
onto a page where universities seem to only focus on the numbers how to do the numbers really something I think they're lacking yes that I think that it's in the education system that is I think that's it's so important because yes we learned to do the numbers but it's like going to a country and you don't know the language that's how you communicate drawings are how we communicate all of those calculations to actually get it built if you don't know what drawings are supposed to look like
5:33
or even how to communicate your designs you you it's kind of pointless because no one's going to be able to understand it or it's going to be an unsafe build so that would definitely help I think in the education system I think the other one that we feel lacking sometimes is Engineers as well giving their experiences out people seem to hold back a little bit because they feel about being sued or you know Lessons Learned and other things is something that I feel the industry could do better at
5:55
explaining to it and I think I'm hopefully trying to solve that a little bit with my channel I think you're trying to get that as well get that practical experience out to Engineers that they don't necessarily get most places yeah I think the practicality of it I think that's what's the cool stuff about it and most students if they go to more theoretical school they probably won't get it because they're probably not talking to Engineers that are actually working in
6:19
the industry they're talking to their professors that may not have industry experience or or just their classmates that don't have that experience as well so I think you know for both of us I think it helps definitely the audience you know they can get it straight from the horse's mouth people that have worked in it that have been doing it and it gives you a more realistic experience so you do know what you're getting into when you're getting into Structural Engineering it's
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not just oh I expected this but it was completely different what is the best advice that I think you've received in your career so far For Me overall career advice I think focusing I did get advice uh from one of my mentors about the first five five plus years ish focus on technical like first things first you're an engineer first get good technically but also not to avoid all of the long-term skills which is communication and all sorts of communication public speaking team
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communication talking to contractors Architects about technical things but in ways they understand always keeping those in mind uh and not neglecting those because those are your your long-term uh career goals I like to say it as if your career as a structural engineer is a skyscraper the technical knowledge is your foundation you need it you that's what you are an engineer you're technical but in order to get that skyscraper that's all of the technical communication
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skills that's what's going to get you up there if you can communicate uh your skills and communicate with contractors and different types of people that's what's really going to elevate your career and that's as you know that's what a lot of the higher-ups look for and have because it really yeah because it really doesn't matter how good an engineer well if you can't communicate it it's really useless like what we sell as Engineers is not our engineering ability but most of our
8:13
communication and Engineering skills are important because if you can't engineer what are you doing but but again equally as important is if you can't communicate that same advice it's useless as well yeah you need both it's it's easy to get it's relatively easy to get a technical person but you can't really get a technical person and a good communicator I think that's kind of like the Unicorn where it's great like oh yeah this this person can lead our company somewhere this person
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can get projects done but if you're purely technical you're kind of it's bad for your career too because if you're too technical uh you know AI computer programming that can kind of take away from your your job skills but that communication skills I don't think In Our Lifetime uh software is going to replace that talking to clients and whatnot and people yes you can always find someone who can do the engineering but it's harder to find those those skills that you can you can
9:11
communicate with sir so I think that there's a really good advice is to have that communication skills raising the bar up and up and that's how you'll get the exploration that's how you'll get your next job and that's how you'll keep new clients and getting your clients is really what's going to elevate your career long term yep definitely once you're in management and the higher-ups your communication that's what really adds value because if you're trying to go for the higher up
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stuff if you don't have any clients how are you going to feed your engineers like it all started somewhere and uh having someone that's Technical and be able to do that stuff it's uh that's really good and that's what higher up companies are looking for if you had any advice for someone to learn either the technical or the communication skills what's that one advice that you would give someone's just starting out if you're just starting out and let's say you're out of school and you just
10:02
want to improve your communication skills I found that taking a public speaking course like Toastmasters which you can find anywhere finding one locally and joining that it's a really friendly place and uh it's a safe place to speak publicly and they train you in that and that's yeah if you're anything I guess like me or maybe Brendan too or when you first started trying to speak it's it was a mess and you were just sweating I remember I was sweating and it was just a mess but it's just another
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skill that you can learn and the more and more you do it the more and more an effective Communicator you can be and you're going to be using it because whether it's one-on-one with a client uh one to five with your team or one to many uh speaking is speaking yes technical skills is also really important especially in your first five years do you have any advice for someone to help improve their technical skills yeah for me it was getting a lot of resources uh for me I'm
11:06
very Visual and I love examples design examples um that's where I find the most in so for me it wasn't it I know some Engineers will like doing this but I just spend money on technical books with examples like oh that's a cool book uh per this code I'm just gonna buy it for myself uh yeah it may be like 50 50 bucks 100 bucks but that's a permanent resource for me and it's going to make me a better engineer um sometimes I see younger Engineers particularly like
11:39
I don't know how to do it we don't have any resources in the office oh well but for me it's hey if I can get a technical resources that can help me and even help my team too I think it's worth it I have no problem spending money on on books design examples that's going to make me a better engineer or just become resourceful and get try to get your company to pay for those resources too is he going through your career Your Design skills are improving and sometimes you may over design certain
12:06
areas to make it easier for the Builder to build do you find do you find that that there's a there's a big discrepancy between those two yeah I think it's it is finding that balance and depending on what the client and even the contractors want because there's that extreme of of you have a beam and you're going to have 100 different beam sizes uh Weight Wise that may be the most efficient but when it gets into construction they're going to make mistakes and in the long run it caused a
12:35
lot of confusion out in the field or there's that other extreme where all the beams are the same over design size and maybe that's too much so I think finding the balance and I think finding the balance that's probably takes for me it's my experience but also that's utilizing you know the principles the higher ups the ones that have a lot of experience and even talk to the contractors uh on what their experience is out in the field too getting all that and then making the Judgment call on
13:05
what's the best way to go about it because for me I haven't found a way that's just like perfect it involves communication with Engineers Architects owners and trying to see what the best balance is and that's always engineering judgment for me do you have any resources probably best in the US of what you would recommend Engineers look out for like you've done like websites or other bits of materials even a technical book that you may recommend for them to pick up I know for uh for me
13:33
in California there's a lot of seismic so I have a lot of seismic resources there's a good Seahawk series on on books about different uh types of lateral systems they have some time they have a book for wood they have a book for steel they have a book for concrete about seismic specifically about seismic detailing since that gets complicated so there is a series out there on on the seismic analysis and design of buildings which is really practical so that's that's one
14:06
of my favorites and uh for concrete crsi crsi they have massive books massive examples and they're all practical in terms of uh built what's being built out there so I I think those are some of my favorites it's probably most something more relevant to me but I'm sure others will like to know it as well these I've gone through a lot of earthquake design because I'm trying to design buildings across multiple countries now and I was saying in the frame of they've got
14:36
they've got different levels of earthquake so you've got like design level earthquake and MC level earthquake how do you go about designing a building to make sure there's only a 10 chance in the MC level earthquake that it collapses for us most of the buildings that I work with in the U.S we have uh equivalent lateral Force procedures which is essentially the simplified way of doing that they've adjusted the earthquakes and that procedure is adjusted so so it hits that so on my
15:04
part on most buildings it already hits that by using that simplified elf procedure which is I think nowadays conservative yes but you could go into the performance-based design non-linear analysis where it does get more into that for me I don't have a lot of experience in that only in grad school but I know with the new technology coming up and particularly with Advanced projects that require that type of thing you could go into those uh non-linear analysis the fancy analysis
15:35
that I don't have too much experience with but they can they can do that definitely yeah I remember in grad school where we got a bunch of different earthquakes and and did all that I'm definitely out of touch with that but you're doing that stuff because I'm Dreaming even two levels of that lateral forces on because I know in Australian standards you've got the basic 10 load which is your basic hand copy saying 10 logo sideways you're done pretty much but then you go up to more where you
16:00
look at the building modes and you amplify the building modes to get that I'm assuming that you normally go into that the more detailed Dynamic analysis or you just stay at the basic for us we try to do when it when it triggers it if we can we try to do elf just in terms of uh design efficiency but when it comes to Dynamic we do have that software as well where uh we modify the software loads to get that Dynamic force and to amplify for the the higher modes but which for me I like to keep
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things as simple as I can and what's what's needed in terms of engineering judgment you don't want to do that for like 100 story building but if it's like four-story building
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and you probably find though near the lower modes you are in that low you normally in that range anyway because the building's so stiff it doesn't get too much savings from the dynamic analysis yeah but I know uh especially with the these high profile projects that you've probably seen um I've seen some of the analysis on those those things they get pretty crazy in terms of the modeling even just the structure uh it's uh it's impressive it gets fun though but that's probably
17:21
the one thing I love about Don at least earthquake analysis is the understanding the building behavior in the Dynamics is because it really makes you in tune with how the structures are actually behaving as opposed to just going down that basic analysis and using that yeah that was for me back in grad school I think that was a fun class yes uh having different types of earthquakes and even uh doing a pushover analysis and seeing how much it would deflect and then even doing uh we
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used to have those Open Seas I think they still use open we still use open space we're using Open Cities yeah Open Seas I think that software's probably gotten a lot user friendly hopefully when I was using it but uh yeah I remember I remember coding in that thing but it was uh really cool how powerful that software was and and what you could do with it probably moving on to the software I'm sure everyone likes it what type of software do you use to design your buildings at the moment uh for me
18:18
for concrete I like to use etabs for lateral analysis and um for slab design Ram concept or PT data depending on what's needed and for steel uh RAM structural system or just depending on the size of the building maybe just a quick 2D software like enter calc or something like that or hancocks even if it calls for it and for what I still like to use a spreadsheets uh in terms of wood I still like to design wood using spreadsheets or hancocks or so it's always good to
18:56
have a broad range and it seems like it's very simple in Australia we use etabs Ram concept we've got another software called Raptor which is more your two-day analysis on concrete structures but it seems like we use very similar software globally yeah it's a small community so I'm sure word gets around on like what's effective and what's not it doesn't matter what software you're using you need to get to the same answer and every every company is going to use
19:18
something different because they have more experience in it so it's not I think it's not worth learning those softwares if you're just starting out it's way better just another structural Dynamics because the software is easy in the end yep learn your Basics and the software um that's your job as an engineer to make sure it's working right it's um your your job is to interpret the results of the software not learning how to set up a model in it it's part of the
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process but that's not your end goal your end goal is we get the correct results using this software where do you see the future of engineering going I think the future is going to be a lot more technology driven especially with you know advances in computer programming computer science AI a lot of Automation in the industry I think that is inevitable like we're gonna get better and better and better at at automation of buildings and what does that mean for Structural Engineers
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I think that means you're going to be doing a lot less of the manual calculations like I remember learning in school moment distribution Hardy cross method I don't do that it's the software does that uh does that mean I have no use as an engineer no uh software even if it is fully automatic someone needs to sign for it and someone needs to make sure it's still doing it right the computers aren't perfect so your job as an engineer I think is learning more getting back to the basics the
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fundamentals of you know mechanics Statics does the software look like it's giving out the right results um and that's when your use as a structural engineer is going to be I think a lot more uh useful versus just doing manual hand calculations a lot more automation is going to help you do a lot more designs a lot quicker um so I think getting Basics is going to be a lot more important in the future and less on the manual calculations and like we mentioned earlier that's going
21:25
to be the communication skills I think in the future you can't just have one person being technical those Engineers need to be tactical and communication because communication it's still got to go through people AI that design has to go through different types of people and again the communication that we go through to communicate our designs to everybody all sorts of people probably the one thing we're going down will the automation side of the point of view as well so if we can only do so
21:52
much and I found that probably a good skill to even pick up is in addition to your you know your technical skills your communication skills is some sort of knowledge of programming languages as well because it allows you to modify the script and make your designs faster and with us moving down that more technology path we probably want to look at more towards the software industry and how they have done it and looking at some of the those software the soft those hard
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skills into software programming will also be helpful for an engineer moving in the future yeah definitely agree the more you know about the software and what it's doing the more less black box it is uh yeah it's you don't want to be in that position where you have no clue what the software is doing you should always have at least something in the background some knowledge of maybe fem you don't know how to do it but at least you know the programs utilizing fem and the pros
22:40
and cons of it so thanks for taking the time to meet me and yeah thanks for coming all the way to L.A yeah it's a couple hours thanks for asking me all these questions [Music]
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