Engineering Management Institute

Personal Development and Professionalism

What to Learn and When in Your Engineering Career?

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This is a guest blog by Fernando A. Ceballos, P.E.

What does getting ready for graduation, starting a new job, preparing to take your FE/PE, or picking a new hobby have in common? They all require some type of game plan to make progress and include direction of where you want things to go.

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there, and sometimes that road ends up in a place you don’t want to be at.

What Is Relevant Right Now?

Don’t get lost in wanting to learn everything there is to know about everything in your career. Focus on becoming proficient at what you do now, then, as you find time, learn the next skill. There is a balance that must be found between getting ready for the next promotion and not failing to do a good job at your current role.

learn

As an engineer, you may want to eventually take management path and therefore lose focus on the design aspect of your current role. You might fall into the trap of wanting to work on your business development skills, budget/schedule management, etc., and forget that you must learn the design fundamentals of the work you will one day manage. You might fail to realize that without a solid technical foundation, you will struggle to train your future staff.

Developing Your Game Plan

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Developing a Personal Brand as the Jack of All Trades

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This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee

Developing a Personal BrandAt some point in your career or during your job search, you must have been asked the famous interview question, “Tell me about yourself.” If you often respond to such questions with “I’m great at solving problems” or “I’m a good leader who others can depend on in all situations,” this article will help you better understand and developing your personal brand so that you can send the right message to those who are considering you for a job or make a strong impression on those who are meeting you for the first time.

Being the “Jack or Jill of all trades” does not automatically make you “master of none,” although in most cases, it’s unlikely that you’re an expert in one particular area. But that’s what makes you unique, and you can be among the most valuable members of your team or company. And this begins with you taking full ownership of your unique position, and clearly brand yourself as one who is approachable and resourceful.

Developing a Personal Brand

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5 Ways to Establish Yourself as an Expert in Your Field

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

Yourself as an ExpertNo matter what your particular engineering discipline or industry, there is immense value in establishing yourself as an expert. In both Seth Godin’s “Linchpin” and Cal Newport’s “So Good They Can’t Ignore You,” very compelling cases are made for why someone should strive to become an expert in their field. To be the go-to person for a given subject is not only incredibly gratifying, it also provides excellent job security and flexibility.  

Yourself as an Expert
While it may be clear that becoming an expert is extremely valuable, it’s less clear how to go about becoming an expert. 

In this post, I’ll offer five concrete strategies you can use to establish yourself as an expert in your field. 

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What Makes You YOU?

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This is a guest blog by Pamela A. Scott

What Makes You YOU?What do you want to be known for as a professional? Call it personal branding if that phrase means something to you. What do you want your peers, bosses, clients, and professional associates to say about you? 

How can you stand out from the crowd? What differentiates you from your professional associates? 

For seven years, I did the kickoff session for a future leaders program for the Georgia chapter of the American Council of Engineering Companies. Participants were young engineers with a few years on the job. We could have anywhere from 25 to 50 in the room.  

I always asked them to tell me about their company. Every one of them said something along the lines of “we’re the best . . .” Basically, they all said the same thing — engineering and technical skills. 

Then I’d ask what differentiates their firm from others in the room. Silence.  

Let’s take that to the individual level. What makes you YOU? What do you want people to remember about you?  

Here are some ideas to get you thinking about yourself. 

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Find Your Genius Zone: The Ultimate Personal Brand

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This is a blog by Jeff Perry, MBA

Personal BrandPersonal branding is getting more and more attention as a piece of building our careers, yet many people ignore it or do not even know what it is. Whether you do it intentionally or not, you are putting off a personal brand — but is it the one that you want to have?

Let us dive deeper into how you can take charge and help others perceive you in the way you want to be known.

What Is a Personal Brand?

Put simply, a personal brand is how you promote yourself. It’s the amount of “who you are” that you allow the world to see. It’s your opportunity to tell your story and differentiate yourself from others.

Personal Brand

An easy way to think about a personal brand is to imagine a simple Venn diagram. In one circle are all of the attributes, skills, personality traits, interests, and experiences that you have. In the other circle are all of the ways you show that to other people — online, in a resume, on LinkedIn, personal websites, and more. The intersection of the two circles is your personal brand — how much people actually see of who you truly are.

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3 Steps to Building an Accountability System for Your Engineering Career

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This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee

Accountability SystemCareer success and growth comes to us when we accept responsibility for our actions, our wins, and our failures. This is because what we put into our career, from education to continuous learning, training, and certifications, dictates what we get out of task accomplishments, project achievements, and daily performance. We begin to notice that no one else but ourselves controls the power of success by taking full ownership of our consistent everyday actions, positive thoughts, and constructive energy.

Taking full ownership for building an accountability system for your engineering career is a powerful thing because there is no way to go back and fix the mistakes you made or change your career choice. However, at one point, you will discover that to change your engineering career trajectory, you will have to make changes to your daily routine and build an accountability system to guarantee those changes will remain in place for as long as it takes for them to become habits.

Accountability System

Here Are Three Tips for Building an Accountability System for Your Engineering Career:

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Why You Need a Coach

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

Need a CoachI need a coach. Anyone can trudge through a task or lesson on their own, but if I truly want to get better, I’m in need of a coach. 

I’ve been an athlete all my life. I started soccer at age 6, baseball at age 8, and I lettered in both football and track in high school. Attending a senior military college and then entering the Air Force afterward meant intramural sports, physical training, and annual physical fitness tests from the age of 18 until my retirement from the service in 2017. Of course, we lead active lives in our house as well: hiking, cycling, CrossFit, surfing. Well, you get the idea. I’m not a couch potato. 

The reason for that self-absorbed preamble is to establish that at 55 years, I’m not a novice to physical fitness or the gym — and despite all that experience, I STILL need a coach! 

Successful People Are Lifelong Learners 

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Seeing the World With an Entrepreneurial Point of View

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

EntrepreneurialWhen I was an undergraduate engineering student, my favorite professor was a brilliant man named Dr. Peter Gregson. While I would never call him eccentric, he definitely stood out from the rest of the faculty. He was one of the few professors in the department who actually made things. He had developed products and built companies to sell those products throughout his career. This gave him, in my mind at least, a lot of credibility as an engineer and as an educator. Unsurprisingly, one of Dr. Gregson’s mantras was on the importance of having an entrepreneurial mindset. Whether you work for yourself or for someone else, seeing the world with an entrepreneurial point of view can have a profound impact on your career as an engineer. Ultimately, engineers who learn to think like entrepreneurs are better innovators, solve bigger problems, and are more productive than their colleagues.

Focusing on the Problem

As engineers, most of us are trained to master “solution space.” In school, we’re handed assignments and asked to solve for x. The problems that need to be solved are literally packaged up and delivered to us.

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4 Behavior Changes That Create Confidence Through Consistent Implementation

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This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee
4 Behavior Changes That Create Confidence Through Consistent ImplementationYour low self-esteem is a temporary condition. You will rebound from it, just as surely as you gravitated into it. As Jim Rohn once said:

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day, while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.”

If you’re aiming to develop your inner confidence, then you must accept the fact that confidence is the byproduct of consistently implementing a set of actions and behaviors that create self-worth. These actions and behaviors will cause your character to transform and you will become a more confident version of yourself because you have increased your perception of yourself.

Here Is the List of Four Behaviors You Must Give up in Order To Create New Levels of Confidence:

1. Eliminate Negative Self-Talk

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Confidence = Decisiveness + Commitment + Resourcefulness

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This is a guest blog by Jen Bunk, Ph.D.

ConfidenceIn my last article, I talked about calling forth your confidence. We all have confidence — it’s simply hard to find it sometimes. Especially amidst the chaos, negativity, scarcity, and all of the other problems that we face on a daily basis.

But that’s the whole game, isn’t it?

To be able to shine with confidence despite massive challenges!

That’s how you win as a technical leader.

That’s how you win at the game of life.

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