THE REALITY BEHIND PERSONALITY BEHAVIOUR OF A CIVIL ENGINEER .

As human we do posses ability of making choices and being ready to pay the results of our own choices. It is undoubted reality that despite our similarities and differences in physical appearance we are actually different in our personality and the way we process information and respond to them.

By using a concept of deductive reasoning it is logically acceptable to generalize that a civil engineer as any other person on the planet has personality traits which in one way or another affect the mental and behavioral process. For the civil engineer to be productive in his/her career the following three traits are highly important.

INTROVERTED PERSONALITY

   Introverted personality is an inborn trait of a person. A civil engineer with introverted personality seems to be innovative and creative in dealing with day to day tasks. One of the common features of introverted personality is the ability to take time  to observe,reason and come up with a strong,effective and economical solution to a problem. Engineers who are introverts are very poor in quick judging and quick evaluation (Cain, 2012).

Engineering as a professional requires calmness of mind in dealing with various controversial situations and phenomenon, and there fore an engineer with introversion personality is the one who is able to handle the site situations, design problems, management problems and being able to solve the problems with high degree of effectiveness. It should be noted that there are good and successful engineers who have extroverted personality.

 CREATIVITY

Over Arup, Danish British engineer and founder of Arup Group limited once said “Engineering problems are under defined; there are many solutions, good, bad and indifferent. The art is to arrive at good solution. This is a creative activity involving imagination, intuition and deliberate choice”

    From the quotation of Arup we can extract the few golden words; “This is creative activity, imagination, intuition and deliberate choice”. Despite having the introverted personality another key feature of a civil engineer

is the ability of being creative and innovative in solving daily engineering problems. Creativity helps a civil engineer to brainstorm and reflect on a problem or engineering task to be performed and come up with his/her own way of doing the task which is effective, accurate, acceptable and economic. Creativity unlike introversion personality is not inborn and a civil engineer can learn and become creative.

INQUISITIVE

   In an article “what personality qualities do engineers have” Written by an experienced engineer Auston Matta figures out the important personality traits that civil engineers need to have. One of the key personality element of a civil engineer is curiosity (inquisitive). It is realistic that the spirit  of engineering goes together with curiosity developed inside the person. As problem solvers civil engineers need to develop the spirit of “why this happens?” in their every day task. For civil engineers curiosity may refer to the readiness  to learn  something you are interested (civil engineering concepts) for the purpose of solving a problem or increasing the knowledge on issues that are relevant to civil engineering .Without being driven by curiosity and passion it is really a hard task for a civil engineer to come up with an effective, accurate and economic solution of a problem. Developing the spirit of learning new stuffs related to civil engineering is fun and educative as it keeps an engineer up to date with current processes and issues related to civil engineering career.