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Networking/Client Relations

Building Confidence: Empathetic Stakeholder Engagement

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Empathetic Stakeholder Engagement is a guest blog by Michael Burns, PE, PgMP, DBIA

Stakeholder EngagementPreviously, I encouraged you to broadly engage your network as you explore your professional intentions, creating balance, reducing stress, and inspiring learning objectives. A positive step in a naturally closed system, relying on trusted peers. Yet, as professionals in the Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) Industry, we learn early on in our careers that a wide variety of dynamic voices, which we refer to as stakeholders influence our work and the infrastructure assets we deliver. For sustained success, we must consider the voices who inform and are informed by our work.  

So how do we build confidence as we face challenges, working with these dynamic stakeholder groups? The Project Management Institute (PMI) is one of many good resources to learn the science associated with stakeholder management. Let’s focus on the art of engaging diverse voices for our collective success — personally, professionally, and across the project delivery lifecycle.  

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How to Develop Relationships With Engineering Managers

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This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee

Relationships With Engineering ManagersAs an engineer, you know it’s essential to be a team player, collaborate with your colleagues, and build your skills to advance your career. However, if you want to accelerate “climbing the ladder” or get access to pitch your ideas to the right people, then it’s worth building strong, positive relationships with engineering managers. Workers who maintain a strong, positive relationship with their managers not only increase their employment opportunities, but enhance engagement and improve productivity too. In fact, a Gallup survey highlights that companies with engaged employees increase productivity by 17%.

Without having a strong, positive relationship with your engineering manager, your boss may overlook you when someone is needed to take on a special assignment or travel to represent the company at a trade-show. Moreover, you risk hampering your job growth opportunities and becoming disengaged and unmotivated to work. So, it’s essential to develop positive and strong relationships with your engineering managers. Here’s how to do it:

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How Mechanical Engineers Can Give Back to Their Community

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This is a guest blog by Nader Mowlaee

Mechanical EngineersAs a mechanical engineer (ME), you can look forward to the inherent rewards of a lucrative career. An in-demand job and even job mobility as mechanical engineers typically make above-average earnings here the United States. However, engineers today are looking for more than the monetary rewards that come with this dynamic role. That’s why many mechanical engineers often look to give back to their communities. 

Giving back to your community comes with several benefits. Not only do you get to hone your leadership skills as a mechanical engineer, but it also provides you with networking opportunities and gives you the chance to gain new experiences. Whether you’re a senior mechanical engineer or an experienced mechanical engineering manager looking to share your insight, there are several opportunities you can take to give back to your community. Here’s a few of them: 

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How to Cultivate Excellent Professional Relationships

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How to Cultivate Excellent Professional Relationships is a blog post by guest author Patrick Sweet, P.Eng., MBA

Professional Relationships

Professional relationships are key to success in any profession. Engineering is no exception. Success is fueled as much by who you know as it is by what you know. While this may seem unfair, there’s a perfectly logical reason for this: people do business with people they know, like, and trust. And how do you get people to know, like, and trust you? Through relationships.

Today, I’m going to share five actions you can take to cultivate excellent professional relationships. All of these strategies are simple, and anyone can implement them, regardless of where you are in your career, or what industry you work in. All of them will help others to get to know, like, and trust you.

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Building Real Friendships That Can Get Engineers Hired

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This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee

Real Friendships

It might sound contrary to the idea of career professionalism but building real friendships can and will get you hired. In fact, if you’re not making friends when you network, you’re not doing it properly.

Networking is the most powerful job search strategy because it will lead to getting referred in for jobs that aren’t yet advertised, meaning you’ll have much less or no competition going into the interview process.

Building real friendships works extremely well when they’re based on genuine attraction and interest; think about this not as ‘what someone can do for you,’ but rather, ‘what you can do for someone else’ without expecting anything back. That’s how you make a new friend. Help without expecting anything back. Genuine friendships always make sense and feel good when they originate, and they will always pay off in the long run.

Real Friendships

Build Real Friendships That Are Genuine

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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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Delivering Stellar Client Service to Engineering Clients

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Stellar Client Service

Every A/E firm talks about delivering stellar client service and many deliver to that mark.  Why?  Well, before I can provide my opinion let’s set the definition for what constitutes stellar client service.

From my foxhole, stellar client service = responsiveness, collaboration, and establishment of crystal clear expectations.  Without these three elements, you will certainly not develop stellar anything, let alone client service.

Thirty years ago, I learned what delivering stellar client service was as a bus boy, then as a waiter, in a posh restaurant.  We in the A/E industry can learn a lot from the hospitality industry when it comes to client service and “delivering an experience”. From my time servicing clients on two-tops, then four-, six- and eight-tops, I learned how to gauge what our guests (i.e. clients) wanted and when.  How to read body language, how to interact with the guests to establish rapport beyond a transactional relationship, and how to ensure they left with an experience, not just a meal.

In short, I learned how to turn eating into an experience.  I also learned that when it’s done correctly, your fees (i.e. tips!) go up.

Delivering stellar client service in the A/E industry requires engineers to transform the technical act of engineering services from the technical stuff many clients don’t understand (or want to), into an experience.  This is much like the transformation of eating dinner from a biological requirement into a memorable experience.

The 6 Ingredients for Stellar Client Service

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How to be More Effective with your LinkedIn Connections

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How to be More Effective with your LinkedIn Connections is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee.

LinkedIn ConnectionsWhether you’re actively seeking a new job, recently graduated and just want any job, or are proactively seeking the right career growth opportunity, growing your LinkedIn connections and knowing how to use LinkedIn is necessary. We know having connections matter and that LinkedIn is the best tool for getting in front of decision makers and having more interviews, but yet, there’s no place lonelier than a LinkedIn profile once it’s cooled off and people stop writing back to you.

In this post, I want to show you how you can get the spark back into your LinkedIn connections and warm up some decent conversations. All you need to get started is to decide what you want, open your eyes, be present and positive, and listen to what I have to say in this article. Then, take action on what I’m going to share with you, and touch base with me if you need more help.

There happens to be particular differences between how big your LinkedIn network is and the caliber of your network connections. Even though the numbers do not lie, they can often be misleading, especially when the time comes to search for a job opportunity. Size does matter, but it’s not everything!

Concentrating on enhancing the quality of your LinkedIn connections by as little as 5 percent can enhance your outcomes up to 95 percent. On top of that, you will invest 5 times less time on LinkedIn and social networking; the response rates will likely be greater, simply because you are messaging current contacts, and also the interactions will likely be significantly less nerve-racking; usually we can even ask a shared connection for an introduction.

Then why do 90 percent of people looking for work concentrate mainly on adding new connections to their LinkedIn network, with no distinct objective or comprehensive strategy?

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How to Network as an Engineer while Providing Value

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

Network as an EngineerYou’ve likely heard in the past that growing your network as an engineer is key to career success, and that getting ahead is as much about who you know and what you know.

Network as an Engineer

That’s all well and good. It makes sense. The more relationships you have, and the stronger those relationships, the more opportunity you’ll have. The trouble is figuring out how to actually grow your network as an engineer. How do you meet new people? What do you do once you have?

Networking 101

There are two basic components to networking. First, meet new people in your field. Second, find ways to provide value to those people. Networking really is that simple.

Let me give you an example.

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Simply Taking Action will Set You Apart in Your Engineering Career: 6 Ways to Start Taking Action Today

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06-08-15 Taking ActionIf you are currently building an engineering career you know that most of your time is spent on projects, and phone calls, and dare I say in meetings. This leaves little time for you to focus on your career path and development. In case you weren’t aware of this, you are not the only engineer with this problem; in fact 9 out of 10 engineers that I coach, specifically identify this as their biggest problem.

So how do you overcome this challenge? I like to refer to this challenge as ‘the hamster wheel.’ You get so locked into your project-by-project, meeting-by-meeting routine that you can’t stop running on the wheel, because if you do, you fail, or at least you’ve been led to think that you do.

You need to stop running on the hamster wheel today. You need to take action that will help you grow and be able to be more proactive about your engineering career path and development. You need to take action. Most engineers don’t, therefore by doing so, you will really set yourself apart; oh and by the way you’ll have a much better career and life for it.

Here are 6 ways you can take action to start to focus more on your engineering career path and development: [Read more…] about Simply Taking Action will Set You Apart in Your Engineering Career: 6 Ways to Start Taking Action Today