This is a guest post by Kyle K. Cheerangie, P.E.
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.
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.”
Odds are if you’re like most engineers, you show up at work each day, solve problems, go home, and then come back the next day and repeat that process. Obviously, I am simplifying things here. Within that, ‘solve problems’ generalization, lie thousands of amazing projects, inventions, and solutions that move our world forward. Engineers create extraordinary things. But what career-related items do you partake in outside of your engineering projects, and how you do you decide when or why to execute them and move your engineering career forward?
Switching engineering jobs isn’t as easy as switching car gears. There’s a lot of paperwork and bureaucratic red tape involved, a lot of re-training, and of course, the awkward handing in of your two weeks notice followed by the dozens of goodbyes from your coworkers. Nonetheless, this shouldn’t scare you into pursuing what you are truly passionate about. Here are five tips to help you iron out smooth career transitions:
I started my bachelor’s in civil engineering in 2001, more than 15 years ago. I wanted to become a civil engineer, design new roads, buildings, power plants, and fancy high-rise buildings. “Design” is a core concept in the civil engineering curriculum, where students learn to calculate loads, predict capacities, and optimize their precise solutions in very specific cases. In doing so, they become familiar with another concept, “risk”. In school, engineering students learn how to identify risk, quantify it, and attempt to minimize it within their design.
