With the enormous competition in the civil engineering industry for experienced engineers, many firms are highly frustrated and the professionals within are overworked.  A number of consultants I know are shifting their methodology to focus on hiring fresh grads right out of school at a more aggressive pace and taking the time to train and mentor them with the hopes of building long term loyalty from them.  Is your company taking this same approach?  Or is the entry-level market equally as competitive since the number of students studying civil engineering is maybe not as high as it once was?

In the public sector the tendency is toward hiring entry-level civil engineeers.  Most organizations either "grow" their people or "buy" their people; so to speak.  We like to "grow" them, so we focus on entry-level and rarely fill at the journey-level or above.  (We rely on internal Leadership and Succession Planning Programs for that.)  Our luck has been great recently competing with our private sector counterparts as we have been working to get to the BSCE candidates sooner through internships and co-op opportunities.  We have increased our "pending period" which allows us to get to the engineers as soon as they are within a year of graduating.  This way, we can offer employment pending graduation.  There is no guarantee they will stick with us and some have thought it would just give them leverage to negotiate with other firms.  However, early evidence has been positive.  We teach Capstone (Design) courses at local universities and try to even promote the Transportation Industry through to High School and Junior High students via our "Construction Career Day" each year.  We have added a $4,000 signing bonus in recent years and offer a competitive entry-level salary.  We can give them $1,000 of the bonus up front to assist with the transition to state service.  We sell our benefits mostly being Advanced Education and/or Tuition Reimbursement programs.  We owe it to ourselves here in Maryland to protect the bay, so "Smart Growth", "Context Sensitive Design", and "Environmental Consciousness" are at the forefront of our mission.  This tends to be appealing to generation Y.