Failure Lessons from Evel Knievel and How they May Apply to Your Engineering Career
Evel Knievel is a ‘60s and ‘70’s era stunt performer and daredevil. He was often seen on ABC’s Wide World of Sports on Sunday afternoons, jumping his motorcycle over cars trucks and buses. A venerable showman, Knievel is most famous for the televised attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon in Idaho in a steam […]
Top 5 Things To Do in An Interview to Ensure Success
1. Above all else, the best advice my mentor gave me when I was getting ready to interview was “Do the job in the interview”. Simply put, you should know what the job description calls…all you have to do is use examples from your experience to SHOW how you have done the job before, performed […]
If Goal Setting Isn’t Working, Try Going With A Theme
It’s pretty standard fare here on TECC to espouse the benefits of setting goals. The reason we come back to goal setting over and over is because it works. Goals: Define a future intended situation. Focus resource application. Highlight what is important. Can help bring what we want most in life into reality. Goals can […]
Engineering Leaders, Check Your Bias
It was a beautiful fall day, warm but not hot, brilliantly sunny. I walk into the lobby feeling lean and confident, ready to slay the interview. The company President comes out to greet me, and we begin the five hour dance. The day goes well. I present my engineering credentials and experience. The interview team […]
Your Life Is A Program, So Manage It Like One
After a decade-plus of leading and managing programs, there’s one thing I don’t recall ever saying – or hearing someone else say: “gee, I need to find balance in my projects.” I didn’t philosophically, or physically, sit down to figure out how to balance my time, my focus, and my energy between the various projects […]
Inverse Explanations – Part 2: The Danger of Linearity
When most people think about technical communication, their first thought is about how engineers communicate with other engineers. What almost nobody considers, though, is how we communicate with… not-engineers. And yet, it’s a HUGE part of what we do: Our version of fun usually requires a multi-zero’ed budget beforehand; however, there’s no guarantee that […]
Inverse Explanation: How to easily walk a layman through your engineering process.
Remove communication from engineering, and what are you left with? Math, mostly. Solve any problem in the world, but at the end of the day, if you can’t get your idea across to others, you never really solved anything. You’re a falling tree in the forest. Nevertheless, most engineering programs tend to overlook this, […]
5 Steps for Creating Constancy of Purpose in your Engineering Career
I have had the pleasure of providing career coaching guidance to hundreds of engineers through my travels with my book Engineer Your Own Success. One very obvious characteristic of those engineers who are happy in their careers is the constancy of purpose. What exactly does constancy of purpose mean? Purpose is the reason you do […]
Four Service Roots to Engineering Leadership
My introduction to leading by serving began with my dad who was a chemical engineer and continued with my first two employers who both were professional civil engineers. Through their direct instruction, mentoring, and coaching I learned and mastered four service roots that I still use to this day. These include the golden rule(+), […]
Three Methods to Stop Stagnation and Accomplish your Engineering Career Goals
Today we have for you Three methods to stop stagnation and accomplish your engineering career goals… A few years back I had a decent life, I was working at a good company with great pay and a lot of responsibility. But I’d been doing the same job, more or less, for several years and it […]