Did you know that 23% of employees feel they’re overlooked for a promotion? There was a time when hard work and professional conduct were good enough to get engineers promoted. Today, they’ve become the norm. Keeping your head down and slogging hard won’t cut it any more. Engineers need to apply specific tactics to increase their chances of getting a job promotion.
You Are an Expert, and It’s Time to Own It is a blog post by guest author Patrick Sweet, P.Eng., MBA
In the world of knowledge work, expertise is everything. Gone are the days of the master builder who knew every trade and could do it all. Employers look for people with more and more experience in smaller and smaller niches. Experts are linchpins in their organizations in every industry.
Needless to say, being able to lay claim to any kind of specialty is very valuable in one’s career. It’s something every engineer should be pursuing in one form or another.
Luckily, developing expertise isn’t anywhere near as difficult as most people think. In fact, when you stop and think about it, it can be very easy to develop real expertise quickly and to reap the benefits in your career, even if you’re just getting started. The only trick is to re-frame the way you think of expertise.
The first mistake people make with respect to expertise is that they think they need others to validate them as an expert. That’s nonsense. If you know more about a given subject than 80% of people, you’re an expert. You don’t need to be in the top 1%. You don’t need a PhD. All you need is to know your stuff better than most people.
Each state has a unique regulatory landscape that individual engineers and engineering firms must navigate before offering services. At each milestone in the firm’s development, new requirements apply, further complicating the task of staying on course and maintaining good standing. Firms can reduce their paperwork, speed the application process, and reduce their risk of unlicensed practice by taking a proactive, comprehensive approach to firm licensure. Such an approach must pay equal attention to all three sides of the professional licensing triangle: entity management, firm licensing, and the licenses of individual engineers.
Education Requirements for the PMP Certification (Project Management Professional Certification) include a four-year degree (bachelor’s or the global equivalent) and at least three years of project management experience, with 4,500 hours leading and directing projects and 35 hours of project management education OR a high school diploma with 7,500 hours leading and directing projects. Experience may NOT go back more than 8 years. Experience must be non-overlapping.
You will need to send PMI(Project Management Institute) the details of this experience and/or education, so it’s best to gather and prepare this information before you open the application. Once you’ve determined you meet the eligibility criteria, it’s time to apply. Collect the following information and then use the PMI website to guide you through the process. You’ll need specific information such as:
No doubt, writing a resume when you’re just out of college is a challenging task, especially if you think that most employers prefer candidates with experience. The fact is especially true for engineering job openings — everyone would rather hire an experienced pro for such a responsible and challenging position. At the same time, a lot of great companies are looking for young talent as it (let’s be frank) allows them to downsize on the payment. All of this, however, does not mean that you should underestimate the importance of a well-crafted resume — after all, every job opening sees an average of 250 resumes, and only 2% of those candidates land an actual interview. Let’s find out how you can wind up in those lucky two percent and get your resume noticed.
Most engineers, and most people, will tell you that giving a presentation is not something they look forward to. However, given our love of efficiency, engineers should have a different outlook. One reason we give a speech to an audience is because it should be the most efficient way to share information. The presenter has information they need to disseminate to a lot of people, so why not get them all in a room and tell everyone at the same time? Doing so might even generate questions that you can answer for the group that wouldn’t come up if there wasn’t a group of people in that room.
“John, you cannot speak and train on ‘ personal accountability.’ It’s not a topic.” I was told that in April 1995. After a decade of selling and implementing leadership and sales training systems in the corporate world, though, I knew this:
Period.
So I began marketing myself as a speaker on “Personal Accountability and the QBQ!” What is QBQ!? Well, it’s a book that’s sold 1.5 million copies, but more critically, it’s a methodology for eliminating some very human traps:
First off, let me say that if you are considering or already enrolled to take the P.E. exam, good for you. It will help your career tremendously. Your potential for advancement will increase and you will find avenues for career growth you never considered before.
For more on why you should take the P.E. Exam visit my article here: My Top 5 Reasons to Get Your P.E.
To pass the P.E. Exam, I went to PPI for their 18-week preparation course. The course is offered online and live, but also allows you to view the recordings later. I watched each recording repeatedly.
Plan, plan, and plan some more. Nothing will help you more on the P.E. exam then having a solid plan. Lay it out on paper and follow through. This will ensure your preparations are complete. This is another reason why the PPI course is so valuable. They do the planning for you with their weekly lectures and homework assignments.
How to begin your speech planning and design is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.
A long time ago in a conference room far, far away, speakers used to give their presentations using a slide projector. Before computers were easy to move around, the slide projector was the all-in-one machine used to put graphics on the screen during a presentation. You may have heard of the Kodak Slide Carousel. You may have even used one in a presentation or two. To use the carousel, the graphics the speaker wanted to show during the presentation were made into slides. Those slides were loaded into a wheel and as the wheel advanced, a new slide was projected on the screen.
Every professional engineer must treat his projects seriously by allocating enough time to planning and organizing future actions. A project plan is useful not just for improving the quality of the end product, but also for developing better team dynamics and better results for the company you’re working for.
In today’s post, we’re discussing 10 great benefits that will result from proper project planning. Every engineer should acknowledge that a project plans’ quality will always be directly proportional to the quality of the results.
