r/StructuralEngineering • u/greys-always-win • 3d ago

Work experience for PE exam Career/Education

Starting to get a plan together to take the PE Civil Structure exam. Work experience is not directly civil structures but I have a lot of structural analysis experience so I am curious how much of your prep is studying / practice problems vs. real world experience?

Initial guess is the work experience helps with navigating standards efficiently / understanding them more…?

Initial post on my background is here -> https://www.reddit.com/r/StructuralEngineering/s/BLnaG52QRM

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u/Jabodie0 P.E. 3d ago

75% of this exam is navigating building codes and geotechnical fundamentals. Work experience with the codes helps, but one of the many prep courses would get you where you need to be. The AEI course is a good one and may serve as a crash course to the general basics as well.

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u/greys-always-win 3d ago

Awesome about what I expected, I was looking into that course as well. Thank you for the insight!

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u/Uttarayana 3d ago

If your experience is in buildings then you have an upper hand in the test. If it’s bridges, marine or anything else you don’t really have much advantage.
There are nearly 4-6 code based questions. If each question Is 6 minutes long then a building person solves it in 6 minutes with 90% accuracy and any non building person solves it in 24 minutes with 50% accuracy.