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In this episode, I will tell you a short story about a long drive that changed the way I think and had a major impact on our business here at the Engineering Management Institute. I hope that it helps you to cultivate an opportunistic mindset in your career and life overall.
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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.
[Read more…] about Better Marketing for Engineering Firms Through Better Public Speaking
“Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world.”
This quote comes from Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk and beautifully describes what each engineer wants to do and should do to achieve career success: create, innovate, and improve everything around them.
Becoming a successful “wizard,” or engineer, has never been easy because the profession requires complex skills and even more complex responsibilities. To enter such a career, one has to develop the courage and personality traits needed to endure all the challenges one will face in this profession.
Despite a popular opinion, knowledge alone is insufficient to succeed as an engineering professional. You have to have that desire to design the things that millions are only dreaming about. That’s what drives people working on such amazing projects such as an autonomous car and an upcoming flight to Mars.
What else distinguishes these brilliant engineers?
The ability to follow the unwritten laws of the profession that keep them focused and moving forward.
In this article I’d like to focus on these laws in hopes that they can help you to become a successful or more successful engineer.
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In this episode, I talk with two very successful women from The Mathews Group, Melissa Mathews and Tia Over. We talk about communication strategies that you can implement when a crisis arises whether it’s a project crisis, client crisis or career crisis.
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We all know it. We all hate it. Yet, all of us do it at least once in a lifetime. How often have we suffered through a presentation where the slides, usually crammed full of information, were simply read to the audience? It’s not really a presentation so much as a live reading of a document meant to torture audience — or at least it seems that way. The presenter has stuffed as much information as they can onto a slide – a bad practice to begin with – then they read those overcrowded slides to an audience. Those presentations don’t work for three reasons.
[Read more…] about Avoid Torturing Your Audience When Giving Presentations
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In episode 084 of The Civil Engineering Podcast, which is the first episode of a 5 episode Infrastructure Series, I talk with Kristina Swallow, PE., ENV SP, F. ASCE, who is the current President of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), about the importance of sustainable infrastructure.
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Dread going to Work? Then Find your Superpower Today!
Welcome to episode #35 of Engineering Career TV. The theme for today’s episode is: Dread going to Work? Then Find your Superpower Today!
I spend almost all of the Engineering Career TV episodes answering questions that have been submitted by engineers around the world. The questions are typically focused on professional development for engineering professionals, especially relevant to practicing engineers.
You can submit questions for the show by clicking here.
Let’s jump into today’s topic: Dread going to Work? Then Find your Superpower Today! This topic is based on a question from Tammyrae, who asks the following:
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To start an engineering consulting firm or not…that is the question.
Welcome to episode #29 of Engineering Career TV. The topic for this episode is starting an engineering consulting firm vs. working for an engineering consulting firm.
I spend almost all of the Engineering Career TV episodes answering questions that have been submitted from engineers around the world. The questions are typically focused on professional development for engineering professionals, especially relevant to practicing engineers.
You can submit questions for the show by clicking here.
Let’s jump into today’s topic: starting an engineering firm vs. working for an engineering consulting firm. This topic is based on a question from Sebastien, who asks the following:
[Read more…] about Engineering Consulting Firm – Should you start one or work for one?
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In episode 63 of The Civil Engineering Podcast, I talk with Ralph Tulis, a licensed professional engineer about the challenging aspects of construction engineering.
[Read more…] about TCEP 063: Challenging Aspects of Construction Engineering with Ralph Tulis
This is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.
The boss and I were talking the other day about hiring a young engineer. The person we were considering checked a lot of the boxes we were looking for and they had a decent interview. There was no doubt they would meet all the requirements we had in the engineering skills job description. During the first 90% of the conversation, I would bet they were going to get the job. Then came this question:
“Do you think if they had to present in front of a city council I could trust them to go to the meeting without me?”
Unfortunately, the answer to that question was “No.”
That ended any chance the engineer had of getting that job.
I don’t know where they landed and I suspect they were able to get a job. However, it was evident throughout their interview that public speaking was never going to be their strong point. At least, not if they didn’t make an effort to improve their public speaking.
Most engineers need to be trusted to be able to stand up in front of an audience and communicate with that audience. Those engineers that do it well will catch the attention of clients, the public, and the boss because communication skills are highly valued in an engineer.
PSMJ Resources polled a number of public works departments about the engineers that work for them. They asked them to list the most important skills needed to do a good job. Here is the list they came up with:
[Read more…] about Good Communication Skills- An Engineer’s Career Escalator
