What does a land surveyor do?
You establish where everything goes, to millimetres, and every other trade on the site builds off your marks without checking them.
Also called: engineering surveyor, setting out engineer, geomatics surveyor.
A day looks like
- 1You set up over a known point and level the instrument, and you do it properly because everything inherits it.
- 2You take a backsight to a second known point, which is what orientates the whole survey.
- 3You set out positions that people will build to for months without ever questioning them.
- 4You close your traverse back onto a known point, which is the only way to prove you have not drifted.
Hardest part
Nobody checks your work. A whole building can be built twenty millimetres off, correctly, from a wrong mark — and it will not be discovered until something has to fit against something else.
Best part
Closing a traverse back onto the control point with a few millimetres of error and knowing the whole site is where it should be.
How you actually become a land surveyor
- At schoolMaths, and a surveying or geomatics degree or apprenticeship.
- TrainingInstrument training on the job; chartership through the surveying institutions.
- How longTwo to four years of study or apprenticeship, then experience to chartership.
- Your first jobAssistant site engineer holding the staff and learning the instrument.
Frequently asked questions
- What is setting out?
- Marking on the ground exactly where a building's elements go — gridlines, foundations, drainage — from the design coordinates, so that every trade can build to physical marks rather than measuring from drawings.
- What does closing a traverse prove?
- That the survey has not drifted. By measuring around a loop and returning to a known point you can see the accumulated error, and a small closure error is the evidence that the whole framework is sound.
- Does GPS make this job obsolete?
- GNSS is used constantly, but it is not accurate enough on its own for structural setting out, does not work reliably near tall buildings or indoors, and still has to be tied into site control — which is a surveyor's job.
More from Architecture & Construction
Plumber
You find the leak, which is almost never where the damp is, and you work out what to turn off before you touch anything.
Site Manager
You run a site where eight different trades all need the same space on the same day, and you are the person who can stop any of them.
Groundworker
You dig the holes and lay the drains everything else depends on, and the two things that can kill you are collapse and what is already buried.
Building Control Inspector
You inspect work at the stages where it can still be seen, and you are the person who fails a pour nobody wants failed.
Structural Engineer
You calculate whether a building will stand up, and you put your name on the answer.
Demolition Supervisor
You take a building down in the reverse order it went up, and the two things that decide whether anybody gets hurt are sequence and asbestos.
Fire Safety Engineer
You design how everybody gets out of a building that is on fire, and how long the building has to hold up while they do.
Retrofit Insulation Installer
You make old houses warm, and the whole skill is doing it without trapping moisture inside the wall.
Architect
You decide what a building is — how it is entered, lit, used and lived in — inside a budget, a site and a set of regulations that all say no.
Quantity Surveyor
You work out what a building will cost before it exists, and then you defend or challenge every change to that number.
Crane Operator
You move several tonnes through the air over people's heads, mostly without being able to see where it is going.
Heat Pump Engineer
You replace a boiler with something that runs at half the temperature, which means you have to redesign how every room in the house gets warm.
Glazier
You fit glass, which is heavy, sharp and unforgiving — and you decide which kind of glass the law requires in each location.
Damp & Timber Surveyor
You work out why a wall is wet, which is almost never the reason the last person said, and you are paid by people who sell the cure.
Electrician
You install and test circuits that will be hidden inside walls, and the only thing that ever stands between a fault and a fire is that you tested it properly.
Carpenter
You set out, mark and cut timber to fit a building that is never quite square, and you only get to cut each piece once.
Bricklayer
You build walls to a line, level and plumb, at a speed that decides whether the job makes money — and the line is not a suggestion.
Scaffolder
You build the structure everybody else works from, and you build it while standing on the part you have already built.
Roofer
You keep water out of a building using overlapping pieces and gravity, working on a slope, above everything else.
Plasterer
You put a wet material on a wall and have a fixed number of minutes to make it flat, because it is setting while you work.
Steel Erector
You bolt a building's skeleton together in the air, and the frame is not stable until you have finished making it stable.