Civil engineering students in local universities and colleges are weak in engineering and practice, and they are not competitive in job hunting. Based on the situation, we applied a talent training pattern called base training-design and research institute to five undergraduate special fields to improve students’ engineering design ability. We took Design Institute of Yangtze University as the training base, and adopted an operation mode of “college integration, two-teacher guidance, on-site teaching, and engineering training”. The result shows that students’ design ability was effectively improved.