The engineering education is relatively backward for the application-oriented civil engineering specialty in Chinese colleges. These problems of stale and outdated ideas, teaching system relatively poor state, education platform weakness generally exist in engineering education. Based on the current situation of the application-oriented civil engineering specialty and the results of reform theory and practice, the overall idea of the reform of engineering education was put forward, and reform measures such as to establish great idea of engineering education, reconstruction teaching systems, reform of teaching content and teaching method, creation of "five-in-one" model were proposed. This research may provide a useful reference for the education reform of the civil engineering specialties based on application type talents.