Blog

Find Your Genius Zone: The Ultimate Personal Brand

May 10, 2021 By EMI

This is a blog by Jeff Perry, MBA

Personal branding is getting more and more attention as a piece of building our careers, yet many people ignore it or do not even know what it is. Whether you do it intentionally or not, you are putting off a personal brand — but is it the one that you want to have?

Let us dive deeper into how you can take charge and help others perceive you in the way you want to be known.

What Is a Personal Brand?

Put simply, a personal brand is how you promote yourself. It’s the amount of “who you are” that you allow the world to see. It’s your opportunity to tell your story and differentiate yourself from others.

An easy way to think about a personal brand is to imagine a simple Venn diagram. In one circle are all of the attributes, skills, personality traits, interests, and experiences that you have. In the other circle are all of the ways you show that to other people — online, in a resume, on LinkedIn, personal websites, and more. The intersection of the two circles is your personal brand — how much people actually see of who you truly are.

3 Steps to Building an Accountability System for Your Engineering Career

May 6, 2021 By EMI

This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee

Career success and growth comes to us when we accept responsibility for our actions, our wins, and our failures. This is because what we put into our career, from education to continuous learning, training, and certifications, dictates what we get out of task accomplishments, project achievements, and daily performance. We begin to notice that no one else but ourselves controls the power of success by taking full ownership of our consistent everyday actions, positive thoughts, and constructive energy.

Taking full ownership for building an accountability system for your engineering career is a powerful thing because there is no way to go back and fix the mistakes you made or change your career choice. However, at one point, you will discover that to change your engineering career trajectory, you will have to make changes to your daily routine and build an accountability system to guarantee those changes will remain in place for as long as it takes for them to become habits.

Here Are Three Tips for Building an Accountability System for Your Engineering Career:

Who Will Win the Talent Standoff?

May 3, 2021 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Peter C. Atherton, P.E. that was previously posted here.

Playing to win requires a real investment in organizational redesign, along with the creation of both a vision and a culture that are worth the work.

The Standoff

The standoff is between younger talents’ needs and older talents’ interest and ability to engage and develop them. It’s the future versus a non-functional or sustainable status quo.

To succeed, we need to reimagine work in the context of today’s actual constraints and the reality of a forever-changed world.

The Problem

Organizationally, too many of us are in the functional shape of an hourglass.

We have little “middle,” and what we do have continues to be overloaded and piling up with pressure moving upward instead of downward in the organization where more capacity exists.

Why You Need a Coach

April 26, 2021 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Mickey Addison, MSCE, PMP

I need a coach. Anyone can trudge through a task or lesson on their own, but if I truly want to get better, I’m in need of a coach.

I’ve been an athlete all my life. I started soccer at age 6, baseball at age 8, and I lettered in both football and track in high school. Attending a senior military college and then entering the Air Force afterward meant intramural sports, physical training, and annual physical fitness tests from the age of 18 until my retirement from the service in 2017. Of course, we lead active lives in our house as well: hiking, cycling, CrossFit, surfing. Well, you get the idea. I’m not a couch potato.

The reason for that self-absorbed preamble is to establish that at 55 years, I’m not a novice to physical fitness or the gym — and despite all that experience, I STILL need a coach!

Successful People Are Lifelong Learners

[Read more…] about Why You Need a Coach

Be a Better You

April 19, 2021 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Pamela A. Scott

The people who read this blog are educated, experienced problem-solving professionals, and, I’m assuming, really smart. That is what my 15+ years of working with engineers has taught me.

However, for many of those engineers, their confidence wanes when it comes to non-technical knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Does the idea of public speaking give you the shakes? Do you dread having to go to network events, even virtual ones? How much do you enjoy managing people, especially the difficult ones? Are you excited about business development and finding new work?

If you aren’t as confident about those skills as you are about technical knowledge and skills, read on. Here are two steps you can take to conquer your fears and become a better you.

[Read more…] about Be a Better You

How to Become an Effective Engineering Leader

April 12, 2021 By EMI

This is a guest post by George J. Newton

It can be challenging to transition from being a great engineer into a position of leadership. While your technical knowledge and skills are essential to the execution of your role, being in a position of leadership also necessitates a range of non-technical skills. Here are four key principles to help you become an effective engineering leader, one who can not only achieve results, but also lead and inspire teams.

1. Understand Your Team’s Needs

Management positions require that you understand your team’s day-to-day job and develop empathy. The more you can understand your team’s individual journeys and experiences, the better placed you can be to support them to meet their goals and needs. Importantly, this will help you to ensure that they are not only engaged with the work, but that they are also being productive.

The Power of Perseverance in Developing a Strong Engineering Career

April 5, 2021 By EMI

This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee

The good news is that your beliefs can strengthen your engineering career success, and as you build stronger core beliefs, you will raise your motivation to learn and grow into a more capable engineer. But the bad news is that changing your life and reaching your career goals will not be an easy task. You will likely fail over and over again before you succeed, and the chances are that achieving new levels of success on the job will take longer than you had initially forecasted.

However, through building new habits, developing your skills, and demonstrating tenacity and grit, you can create a strong engineering career beyond what you initially thought was possible. On the other side, a poor set of personal habits, a low level of aptitude, and a lack of perseverance can explain why most engineers fail to achieve their career goals.

We are going through a very tough job market right now, and since the pandemic began, there have been many engineers who lost their jobs or had to pivot into a new career path so they can survive, keep making an income, and in some cases, to thrive. But you can’t allow job market setbacks, short-term failures, and temporary job losses to take away your energy and take you away from getting what you deserve.

3 Virtual Presentation Strategies for Tech Entrepreneurs to Accelerate Stakeholder Buy-In

March 29, 2021 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Melissa Marshall

It is no secret that your ability to communicate well about your tech is often the make-or-break reason for project success. You can have the best idea or product in your market, but if your key stakeholder does not “get it,” then you do not get the critical buy-in you need. Communicating tech is so challenging because you must decide which technical details are most important to the audience’s appreciation of the importance of your work, and then you often must make those ideas understandable to audiences that often have little background in your area of expertise. Add to that the challenge that most presentations are now occurring virtually to very distracted audiences, and you have a huge communication challenge to overcome! Here I’ll share three strategies you can use in your next virtual presentation to be more successful.

Be Audience-Focused

How “Grow” Became a Four-Letter Word

March 22, 2021 By Angelique Burns

This is a guest blog by Peter C. Atherton, P.E.

“Grow just means more work for me and more rewards for you.”

That’s an increasing lament from practitioners to principals across our industry.

What went wrong and, more importantly, how can we fix this?

There are many great reasons to grow as an organization.

Here Are Four Reasons I Think Most People Can Get Behind on Our Teams and in Our Firms:

Seeing the World With an Entrepreneurial Point of View

March 15, 2021 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Patrick Sweet, P.Eng., MBA, PMP, CSEP

When I was an undergraduate engineering student, my favorite professor was a brilliant man named Dr. Peter Gregson. While I would never call him eccentric, he definitely stood out from the rest of the faculty. He was one of the few professors in the department who actually made things. He had developed products and built companies to sell those products throughout his career. This gave him, in my mind at least, a lot of credibility as an engineer and as an educator. Unsurprisingly, one of Dr. Gregson’s mantras was on the importance of having an entrepreneurial mindset. Whether you work for yourself or for someone else, seeing the world with an entrepreneurial point of view can have a profound impact on your career as an engineer. Ultimately, engineers who learn to think like entrepreneurs are better innovators, solve bigger problems, and are more productive than their colleagues.

Focusing on the Problem

As engineers, most of us are trained to master “solution space.” In school, we’re handed assignments and asked to solve for x. The problems that need to be solved are literally packaged up and delivered to us.