In the US/UK civil engineering is often taken to mean constructing buildings (very roughly, in a nutshell), whereas other countries (in particular continental E

In the US/UK civil engineering is often taken to mean constructing buildings (very roughly, in a nutshell), whereas other countries (in particular continental Europe) use the meaning that you quote. So you can have a Belgian civil engineer who specializes in theoretical physics, and knows more about the Higgs boson than about "traditional" engineering topics.