Job Description: The Civil Engineering Collective is a service of the Engineering Management Institute (EMI) that provides civil engineering companies with monthly interactive training webinars on topics related to technical and professional development for their staff. Each session is 60 minutes and most provide Professional Development Hours (PDHs).
[Read more…] about Seeking a Civil Engineering Collective Coordinator
The topic for our December 2020 Civil Engineering Collective session will be goal setting as many professionals start thinking about their goals for 2021. In the session, we will walk through three steps that you can take for effective goal setting. However what I’d like to cover in this post is an important step that you must take after setting goals, PRIORITIZING YOUR GOALS.
So let’s assume you followed the three-step goal setting process and you now have ten goals that you will be working on for 2021. How do you decide which goals to work on when?
Firstly, I recommend that you try to organize your goals by the amount of time it will take to achieve them. For example, studying for a certification exam could take 6 months, while reading a book or learning a new computer program could take four to six weeks. While the task duration shouldn’t be the only factor considered when prioritizing your goals, it may help deciding when to pursue each goal.
Once you’ve organized your goals by duration, next you should consider the impact that achieving each goal will have on you, your career, and those around you. I recommend classifying these by “low impact” or “high impact.” For example, if you were to achieve your professional engineering license (P.E.) that would most likely have a high positive impact on your career and also great benefit to your company. However, reading a book on communication skills, while it may help you, probably would be lower impact than a PE license.
[Read more…] about Prioritizing Your Goals – the One Step Most Professionals Fail to Take
Our next live Civil Engineering Collective training session will focus on maximizing engagement and effectiveness through virtual interactions. Something that must be top of mind for all professionals today, especially those in the civil engineering world, who work on complex projects with many moving parts.
Let’s be honest, we’re not getting away from remote work any time soon, and most likely, we’ll never go back to as much office time as we used to have pre-COVID-19. With most great teams, when the rules of the game change, they adjust and continue in their winning ways. One way that your team members can adjust is to become superstars in terms of their virtual work productivity.
One of the biggest areas for improvement in this arena is virtual meeting productivity. I’ve been involved in many virtual meetings over the past six months, and it is clear to me that the person leading the meeting has the most impact on the productivity of that meeting. More specifically, their preparation prior to the meeting, which I believe has the most impact on meeting productivity.
[Read more…] about 15 Minutes of Preparation Can Save Hours for Your Engineering Team
