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Career profile
Meet Brogan, a structural engineer.
Brogan works with clients and architects to turn their vision for a building into a reality.
Find out about Brogan’s career as a structural engineer and how she considers the environment in what she does.
Brogan: My name's Brogan MacDonald, I'm a structural engineer and this is why I love working in sustainability.
As a structural engineer I work with clients and architects to take their vision of a building, right from a piece of paper and turn it into reality.
The construction and building sector contributes to about forty percent of global CO2 emissions. As an engineer, I have a huge responsibility to make sure that my products and materials that I'm specifying in my job, are really sustainable.
My professional carbon footprint is significantly larger than my personal one, because I'm responsible for how much carbon goes into our buildings. So that's our steel and concrete, which are really, really carbon intensive.
I'm proud to work in the refurbishments team because it's really important to try and reuse as much of the building stock that we currently have. So I get to reimagine and recreate all these different options and ideas of these buildings that have been here for fifty, one hundred, two hundred years… and give them a new lease of life.
I went to school in Aberdeen and Scotland and I studied business, art, graphic communication, maths and English. Maths wasn't always my natural forte, unconventionally as an engineer, but I studied an online course that improved my maths and physics and allowed me to get accepted to university, where I studied a structural engineering masters with architectural design.
Apprenticeships is a great option If you're interested in structural engineering, where you can earn while you learn. You'll get to go to college, but also work part time. That means you could help us on construction projects doing the drawings and the calculations.
My top tip for students is just not to accept failure. I failed physics. I failed lots of things at university, but I continued to try and find new ways of working and new ways of learning that suited me better.
As a result of that I've won lots of awards recently and one of them being the best young woman engineer, which was a European award. We need lots of young, inspiring engineers to join the industry to shake things up, challenge new ideas and making sure that the way we design buildings are not what we have been doing for the past one hundred years and we need to improve and change now.
We need lots of young, inspiring engineers to join the industry to shake things up, challenge ideas and make sure that the way we design buildings are not [just] what we’ve been doing for the past 100 years.
Brogan, structural engineer
- Brogan studied a four-year Masters of Engineering with Architectural Design at university.
- She gained qualifications in business, art, graphic communication, maths and English before going to university. Brogan struggled with maths so completed an online course in her spare time.
- Brogan works in a refurbishment team which means she restores existing buildings using new materials to give them a new lease of life.
Green construction
The buildings construction industry can be very carbon intensive, contributing to around 10% of all global CO₂ emissions.
A structural engineer can play a vital role in reducing emissions when designing and sourcing building materials.
Around 80% of the buildings which will exist in 2050 are already here, so engineering skills like Brogan’s in sustainable retrofit and refurbishment are in demand.
Salary and hours
Structural engineer salary:£22,000 to £70,000 average per year
Structural engineer working hours:40 to 42 hours per week
Entry requirements
- University degree: You could get into this role by doing an undergraduate or postgraduate degree, like structural engineering, architectural engineering or civil and structural engineering. You'll usually need GCSEs (or equivalent) at grades 9 to 4 (A* to C) and two to three A-levels or equivalent in maths and a science for a degree.
- Apprenticeship: You can also complete a civil engineer degree apprenticeship. This route usually requires five GCSEs (or equivalent) at grades 9 to 4 (A* to C) and college qualifications like A-levels (or equivalent).
- Higher National Diploma (HND): You can take a Level 5 Higher National Diploma in Civil Engineering, which may help you to find work as a trainee engineer and involves more training on the job to qualify. You'll usually need one or two A-levels, or equivalent, for a higher national certificate or higher national diploma.
This information is a guide (sources: LMI for All, National Careers Service)
For careers advice in all parts of the UK visit: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales
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