Career Goals and Challenges

Healthy Conflict: How Disagreements Spur Innovation

August 13, 2021 By EMI

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

For most engineers, conflict at work is something to be avoided. It’s about as desirable as spilling coffee on your pants before a big presentation or dealing with (yet another) paper jam. There’s an important difference, however, between conflict and most other office challenges: conflict is incredibly important. In fact, almost all innovative products and processes are the result of conflicts at work.

This leads us to two questions. Why is it that conflict is so important for innovation, and how can you approach conflict in a healthy way? In today’s article, I’ll tackle both important questions.

Why Is Conflict Important for Innovation?

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.

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.

2 Steps to Setting Goals for Changing Your Engineering Career in 2021

February 1, 2021 By EMI

This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee

STEP 1: Identify the Outcomes You Want to Create or Contribute To

Align your mission with a company’s mission that motivates you. It is tough to come up with innovative ideas by yourself, especially if you are starting to set new goals or changing your engineering career and you do not know where to start.

If this sounds like you, then you’re not alone. Many engineers have been making career transitions this year and certainly last year in 2020, and I have been there guiding them along the way. I know how it feels to come up short and feel like there is no future for you, and in this article, I want to give you a simple 2-step process to setting powerful goals that can contribute to you successfully changing your engineering career in 2021.

Let’s start by accepting that the world is our playground and we can get to play with our own rules, especially as an engineer. We are a special breed of people who can acquire new skills on demand and can pivot whenever it’s necessary so that we can create better outcomes in our careers and lives. However, you do not have to create your own job from scratch. Just join an existing team, follow their footsteps, and enable them to achieve their grand vision. Then you can branch out later to create your own unique results.

Here is an example: When I decided to leave an engineering career behind and get into technical recruiting, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. All I had was a role model and an attractive staffing company I had just joined. So all the goals I set were fully aligned with that company’s vision and core values.

Finding the Sweet Spot

January 18, 2021 By EMI

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

The New Year always brings us opportunities to think about how we can lead better and manage our projects better. We make resolutions, set goals, and try new things to motivate our teams.

As we do this, it’s essential to take a step back and look at the metaphorical horizon, that is, think strategically. That means harmonizing our personal and professional goals with those of our teams, our work, and our organizations. The better we do that, the better chance we have of being successful in achieving our goals. That’s where the Leader-Sync Model comes in. Generating a common picture and integrating the various needs of the Institution, Project, and People is a great way to help build a shared view and shared purpose.

A Leadership Common Operating Picture

If you’ve been around the military for any length of time, you’re likely to hear the term “common operating picture” (COP). A common operating picture is the view of the battlespace that is shared with everybody that’s involved in that battlespace. It’s called a common operating picture because it’s common across everybody who’s in there, everybody who needs to see it, and what the military now terms “Multi-Domain Operations” (air, space, sea, land, cyber). What’s important about a COP is that information is shared and constantly updated so that everyone has a shared view and can pursue a shared goal.

5 Keys to Career Clarity for Engineers

October 12, 2020 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Jeff Perry, MBA

“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” ~Carl Jung

Vision, clarity, making a plan, taking action — trying to achieve these things can be extremely difficult and even anxiety-inducing in the face of great uncertainty.

Sometimes we look to other sources for guidance on what we should do next in our career and lives. Certainly mentors, guides, and coaches can be partners in this process. But in the end, the responsibility for getting clarity and living the life you want is up to you and no one else.

No one understands you better than you understand yourself. Only you have lived through every single one of your life experiences so far.

The person who has the greatest ability to unlock clarity in your life is no one other than you.

If you do as Carl Jung suggests and look inside, you can uncover some amazing truths about what you believe and what you are working to become. Clarity involves not foretelling the future, but seeing clearly our past and present circumstances, and deciding what kind of life we want to create.

Here are 5 Keys to Career Clarity for Engineers

1. Adjust Your Mindset

Revisiting Your 2020 Resolutions: 3-Month Check

March 9, 2020 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Manny De La Cruz

If you take the time to look at the calendar, you will notice that it is already March. At the time of this writing, several significant events had already occurred in 2020. The mere mention of the following words will conjure up the high-pitched, almost childlike delivery of the phrase “Oh, yeah!” Australia, Mr. Peanut, Kobe, Coronavirus, and Megxit — just to name a few. Was I right?

Unfortunately, another significant event is occurring in 2020. That’s right — the general abandonment of New Year’s resolutions. In December 2019, I did a latinXfactor series webinar for the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, where I highlighted that 46% of Americans make New Year’s resolutions and only 8% of that population will see them realized. In that webinar, I proposed that students pursuing STEM degrees should not only commit to personal resolutions but also to resolutions that would aid their professional development. This same concept should also be applied to professionals in STEM. 

Be Wary of the Echo Chamber

February 24, 2020 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Tim Austin, PE

A few years ago, I attended a conference sponsored by the Florida Engineering Society. The keynote speaker was retired astronaut Story Musgrave. Story is a powerful speaker, and I tremendously enjoyed the many tales of his unparalleled career. One particular story that he shared struck a chord.

Story was the astronaut who worked on the Hubble Telescope during Servicing Mission 1 to fit the corrective lens. He shared that, in his preparations, he consulted with the world-renowned figure skater, Dorothy Hamill. Many wondered why an astronaut would consult with a figure skater regarding the repairs to the telescope.

Take Action Despite Uncertainty

February 10, 2020 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Jeff Perry

“Treat mistakes as learning, not failure” ~ Dan Sullivan

“Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast” ~ Tom Peters

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” ~ Thomas Edison

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” ~ Winston Churchill

These quotes, and others like them, seem to be preached more and more, all of the time. Viewing failure in this way is actually quite important; it allows us to move through uncertainty, even though that uncertainty can be a source of great fear. But believing in the principle doesn’t mean it’s automatically easy to actually do it. So how do we deal with fear, move through uncertainty, and take action anyway? Here are four ideas:

Goal Setting: Think Big, Be Mindful

January 20, 2020 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Michael Burns, PE, PgMP, DBIA

What a cool topic for my first EMI Blog—Goal Setting—as publishing and mentoring have been on my list of career objectives for many years. Writing my first draft, I realized it was January 4th, my father’s birthday and the time of year where resolutions and goal setting run rampant. My parents, school teachers who raised me in Boulder, Colorado, often limited their advice to philosophical statements like, “We are who we are becoming.” As a kid, this lack of concrete guidance frustrated me, as I sought clear direction for a successful life. Thirty years into my civil engineering career, as a parent, mentor, mentee and friend, I hold dearly to my parents’ guidance, accepting that we are who we are becoming is step one in balancing our desires against life’s events.