Engineering Management Institute

UPCOMING WEBINAR

Good Engineers Practice: Skills to Advance Your Career

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This is a guest post by Kyle K. Cheerangie, P.E.
Practice

As a younger engineer I occasionally spent time doing the wrong things. My eagerness caused me to accept tasks and work with unconfirmed assumptions. This lead to repeat work and disappointment from my mangers. My focus was on activity, not results.

Keeping a journal helped me learned that I was spending much of my time doing tasks that did not contribute to my team. The best engineers perform the necessary tasks and delegate or eliminate the unnecessary.

Practice

For example, spending weeks to create a report with multiple iterations for comments and changes, when a simple technical memorandum would suffice. Young engineers typically experience challenges like this one and most managers don’t have the heart to say, “No! This is not what I want.”

Learn and practice these skills to improve: 

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Who Are Quantity Surveyors and Why Are They Important?

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This is a guest post by Mike Johnston
Quantity Surveyors

Civil engineering is a discipline many people are not really familiar with. This is a real shame since civil engineering impacts our society so much. Namely, it comprises various professions, including structural, geotechnical, environmental, water resources, construction management, and transportation engineers.

One particularly interesting area is quantity surveying, a profession that blends engineering, construction, and economics. The emphasis is on the last part, albeit there are many other tasks that these experts perform.

Word up

To avoid any confusion, let us just provide a quick clarification of terminology.

Those who live in Canada or the US might have heard the term construction cost estimator.  On the other hand, a quantity surveyor is widely used in countries like UK and Australia. The roles of the two are more or less similar depending on the region. For instance, a construction cost estimator in the US is equivalent to a quantity surveyor in the UK, even though there are some extra requirements for each one.

Sometimes, the terms cost managers and cost consultants get thrown around. But, in this article, we are going to use only quantity surveyor, though in a broader sense that transcends local and project-to-project differences.

What do surveyors do?

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How to Use the PSI Framework to Sell Yourself in a Job Interview

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How to Use the PSI Framework is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee
PSI

PSI stands for more than just “pounds per square inch” when inflating tires. It also stands for a meaningful way to enhance your value to a potential new or existing employer, especially during job interviews.

The PSI framework is also a great method you can use on the job to sell a project, product or idea to just about anyone. It’s an amazing tool to convince engineering leaders and managers that there is a problem needing to be addressed and that your solution is the best way to fix the issue.

P – Problem

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Have You Heard of the S.O.A.R Method?

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Have You Heard of the S.O.A.R Method is a guest blog by Thomas Anderson, P.E.

S.O.A.R

How do you prepare for an interview? Do you read typical questions that the employer might ask? Do you practice artful responses? The S.O.A.R. Answer Method is helpful for preparing for interview questions and it keeps you focused on the discussion while you are answering.

This answer method works well on interview questions 11 and 15 on an article called Top 20 Interview Questions and How to Answer

The S.O.A.R. Method Explained:

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From Civil Engineer to Manager – Anthony Fasano Featured on Recent ASCE Interchange Video

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Engineering Management Institute (EMI) President Anthony Fasano, P.E. was recently featured in an American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Interchange Video entitled From Civil Engineer to Manager.  ASCE Interchange is a multi-part series of educational videos on important issues in the engineering community produced by ASCE.

In each monthly 6- to 7-minute segment, Casey Dinges, ASCE’s senior managing director of public affairs, membership, and marketing, engages experts and other leading voices in interviews from the studios of LAI Video in Washington, DC.

Here is Fasano’s full October 2018 ASCE Interchange video…

In this video Fasano answers the following questions:

  1. Civil engineers at most firms, usually early in their careers, must decide whether they want to take the technical path or the management path. How does an engineer decide or know which way they should go?
  2. If the civil engineer has decided they want to take the management path, what are some ways the engineer can show their boss they are ready to manage?
  3. What skills do you think a civil engineer must have to be a manager? Of those, which three skill do you think are the most important?
  4. If they don’t have these skills, how can they develop these skills?
  5. What’s the difference between a manager and a leader?
  6. Are there any good books or podcasts you’d recommend that provide more insight into managing?

This is Fasano’s second ASCE Interchange Video.  His first, which published in January of 2016 here, covered recruiting and hiring trends in civil engineering and has had over 11,000 views to date.

About Engineering Management Institute, Inc. – Engineering Management Institute, Inc. is a coaching and training company based in Ridgewood, New Jersey.  Founded in 2009, Engineering Management Institute has inspired thousands of engineers through its various content channels which include written articles, podcasts and videos.  The company and its founder has been cited on many major media outlets including CNN, Mashable, and mostly recently Forbes.

 

For Engineering Firms, It Takes More Than Talent to Win

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For Engineering Firms, It Takes More Than Talent to Win is a guest post by Christian HaringTalent

You’ve got plenty of talent and depth on your bench, and your sales team is doing a great job putting together compelling proposals. Yet too often, your team is cut in the final round, or turned away before you’ve even had a chance to show what you’re capable of. If you’ve been in this business for any length of time, you know every play can’t be a touchdown. Yet if you find yourself going up against the same competitors over and over again, or pursuing projects that aren’t an ideal fit, there’s one way to refresh that pipeline and win more business that few engineering firms appreciate or exploit. In fact, it’s probably the last aspect of your business that you would associate with winning anything, let alone new business: regulatory compliance.

Whether you see it as a growth driver or not, licensing and entity management are basically the playing field you provide for your business development teams. And at key moments throughout your firm’s corporate lifecycle, licensing influences your playbook as well, affecting agility, profitability, and performance long after the contracts are signed. By creating a favorable regulatory playing field, equipping your team, and embracing the power of compliance to enhance your brand, you can position your firm to win more of the projects you really want.

Own the Field

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How to Sell Yourself in a Job Interview to Guarantee a Job Offer

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How to Sell Yourself in a Job Interview to Guarantee a Job Offer is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee

Job Interview

You’ve sent out your resume and cover letter and gotten that job interview you wanted. Are you ready? Because now it’s time to concentrate and do whatever it takes to get the job you’ve always wanted. Begin by learning everything there is about the company you’re interviewing at, the person you’re be meeting, and the position you’ll be interviewing for.

Go to LinkedIn and search for other people with the same job title, who work at the same company. Go to all their profiles and see what information and data you can gather about their work and projects. Write everything down and take it to the interview with you; and feel free to ask questions based on what you found.

From your first attempt to contact a person and throughout the entire interview process, keep the 7-38-55 Rule Of Communication in mind. This is a communication model by Albert Mehrabian, a professor of psychology at UCLA, which suggests that the word we speak and say out loud is only 7% of what is read and understood by the recipient of our full message. 38% of our message comes from the intonation (pitch) and changes in the volume and speed of our voice, while a whopping 55% is from totally non-verbal cues such as body language, facial impressions, and posture.

Make sure that your body language and tone of voice demonstrate your level of enthusiasm for the job you’re interviewing for. Sit up straight, shoulders back, arms in front of you, not crossed, while keeping eye contact in order to show your confidence with your body in addition to your verbal cues.

Follow these tips to ace every stage of your upcoming interviews and get more job offers than ever before.

1st Job Interview: Ask Questions and Identify Problems

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Better Marketing for Engineering Firms Through Better Public Speaking

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Better Marketing for Engineering Firms Through Better Public Speaking is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

Marketing

Colter has been enjoying working at his job as an engineer at a regional engineering firm.  He is good at his job, liked by his co-workers and management, and has moved up a couple of rungs at the company.  At his last performance evaluation, he visited with his manager about starting to take on client relations and they agreed Colter should look for an opportunity to begin creating a relationship with a client.  He was motivated by the prestige of being a client manager, saw it as the chance to make another move up in the company, and begin planning how to cultivate the new client relationship.

A couple of months after his evaluation, Colter was invited to sit in on a strategic planning session for the company.  One of the discussions was about how the firm could grow through the acquisition of new clients and specifically, how they could find new municipal clients.  They listed about a dozen cities they would be interested in pursuing and it turns out that Colter knew the assistant public works director, Tim Harrison, in one of the cities.  They had met through the local section of ASCE, served together on a couple of outreach projects, and usually sat with each other at the monthly luncheon.

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The Foundation of a Great Management Career in Engineering

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This is a guest blog post by Mary Jane Riccardi, SPHR, MBA

Management Career

Whether project management or organizational management, the foundation of a great management career starts with exceptional technical/professional performance. Many engineering professionals start their careers with strong technical skills, honed through years of schooling, challenging work assignments, and delivering on project management expectations. Moving into a project or organizational management role takes a new set of skills, which can be developed long before acquiring the manager title.

Through developing professional consulting competencies engineers can accelerate their skill development while providing additional contribution to their firms. Also, it allows early career engineers to demonstrate their people skills to those internal decision makers, who may be making those promotional decisions.

So what specifically are professional consulting competencies? After talking with and listening to many junior and senior professional consultants in the A/E industry, I developed a 10-competency model that can be used to guide any engineer in their role as a professional consultant. Executing on technical skills and abilities can develop the first four, the next five require focus on people. Pursuing self-development is important regardless of your career goals.

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How to Increase the Efficiency of Your Construction Project

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How to Increase the Efficiency of Your Construction Project is a guest post by Holly Welles

Construction ProjectConstruction project efficiency has become a problem over the last 50 years. In spite of advances in construction technology, project efficiency has dropped by nearly half, which leaves jobs undone for years after their projected completion date. Construction holds the title of the industry that has the lowest productivity gains of any comparable sector, leaving many people to wonder what could have slowed down the workflow so much. Despite all of this, there are some things that project managers can do to increase the efficiency of their construction projects.

Be Proactive, Not Reactive

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