A discussion was started in Linked_In, entitled "Which Engineering Discipline Requires the Highest Level of Knowledge, Competence and Skill?"

Here are some comments from the discussion:

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First off, let me state that I am a Civil Engineer and I play for the Water Resources and Environmental Team. I've always had alot of respect for some of the other Engineering Disciplines. I remember taking beginner courses in those fields and getting a taste for how uncomfortable and out of my realm I felt. If you had to name the three most difficult Engineering Disciplines, which would they be? Here are mine:  #1 - Nuclear #2 - Chemical #3 - Electrical (I learned a long time ago to stay away from electricity)

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CIVIL hands down from my biased perspective. A great Civil Engineer is a generalist and needs knowledge about so many other of the more narrowly focused specialty engineering types. The question comes down to simple calculation. Does the engineer who knows all about a single discipline (electrical for example) out-total the overall wide bandwidth of knowledge that a civil engineer has.

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I think the discipline that requires a high level of knowledge, competence and skills in engineering, is the specialty of project management, due to its interdisciplinary mainstreaming, which provides, on one hand, big skills in constructability, and on the other , deep knowledge in support of claims.
 
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In my experience the highest level of knowledge and competence resides in the hydraulics, chemical processing, and structural guys. These disciplines require practitioners to remain closer to fundamental / theoretical underpinnings and offer generally fewer codes and standards on which one might rely.


I have never worked with a nuclear engineer, but I imagine that the high consequence of failure alone requires those professionals to be very, very competent and skilled.

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I don't think there is a way to rank the engineering fields. It always depends on how deep you dig in a specific field, how much creativity you merge with provided application rules, where your work is situated on the scale between simple implementation of rules and scientific work pushing the boundaries. That, in my opinion, applies to all engineering and science fields.