2023 Geotechnical job market analysis

Interested in seeing some facts about the Geotechnical Engineer job market? Below we present you such an analysis with data from the CEEcareers website.

Within 2023, 12,530 jobs covering the entire range of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) were posted, 1,268 of them belonging in the geotechnical engineering field. There was a very long tail of titles (no grouping was made), with many of them appearing only a few times. The following are the most popular titles related to the geotechnical engineering field:

How long do job positions stay posted?

The average time that Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) jobs were posted was 102 days. Geotechnical Engineering job positions appeared to be slightly harder to fill, with jobs being posted for an average of 115 days.

Jobs and seniority

Based on 2023 data, the average required experience across the spectrum of CEE jobs was 5.8 years. The average required experience for Geotechnical Engineer jobs was slightly higher, at 6.2 years. Grouping the data into groups of years of required experience, showed that most jobs in the Geotechnical field are in the range of 4 to 7 years of required experience, i.e. mid-level jobs.

What salary should I expect?

Over the years there have been several job postings that also included information on the annual salary (upper limit) that the company was willing to pay for that position. Specifically for 2023, the average "upper bound" annual salary of all CEE jobs that contained this information was $97,803, while for the jobs belonging in the Geotechnical Engineering category it was $97,727 (pretty close!). The highest paying Civil and Environmental Engineering subspecialty is Coastal Engineering, at $120,000.

The requested seniority predictably plays a significant role in the salary offered. The following chart gives a picture of the salary offered against the years of experience required, for 2023 job posts that had both of these pieces of information.

Geographical distribution of jobs

Although jobs are posted from many regions of the world, the vast majority of them were in the US, with the (distant) second country in the number of posts being Canada. By looking at the posted jobs specifically in the US, we can have a breakdown by state. The US states with the most CEE jobs according to our 2023 statistics data are shown below.

As we can see, California is leading by a wide margin, with 15.48% of posted geotechnical jobs in 2023. Another West Coast state, Washington, is next with 10.02%, while in third position is Massachusetts with 8.13%.

Moving south, we find the state of Texas with a percentage of 6.57%, while returning to the (North)East coast we find New York with 5.57%. Pennsylvania and Virginia follow with 4.79%, with Colorado, Florida, and North Carolina rounding out the top ten at 4.01%, 3.01%, and 2.90%, respectively. 

More general (for the whole CEE sector) but also in-depth analysis as well as a comparison with the other Civil and Environmental Engineering subspecialties can be found at the following link:

https://www.ceecareers.com/blogs/ceecareers-2023-job-market-analysis