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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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Can You Explain Your Engineering Career Goals While Standing On One Leg?

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Can You Explain Your Engineering Career Goals While Standing On One Leg?Career Goals

As we begin another calendar year, I would urge you to think deeply about your professional career goals for the upcoming year, but also beyond that.  What do you want to accomplish in your engineering career?  What does your career look like from a big picture perspective?  Could you explain it succinctly if I asked you to?

There are several fables around the idea of being able to describe something while standing on one leg, basically suggesting that this would force you to be concise and focus on the most important aspects of the thing you are attempting to explain.

Therefore, I want to challenge you to do this in your own engineering career.

[Read more…] about Can You Explain Your Engineering Career Goals While Standing On One Leg?

TECC 41: The Engineering Career Coach Podcast – 7 Steps to Engineering Powerful Personal and Professional Goals – EYOS Part 1 of 7

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Engineering Management Institute

In this session of The Engineering Career Coach Podcast, I provide seven steps that you can use to set powerful personal and professional goals or revisit existing goals for the upcoming year.

This episode is the first in a series of seven where I am going to walk through the seven key elements to creating an extraordinary engineering career based on my newly published book, Engineer Your Own Success – Updated and Expanded Edition. In this episode, we will focus on goal setting, which is such an important component of your career and life.

“The future you see is the future you get.” – Robert Allen

[Read more…] about TECC 41: The Engineering Career Coach Podcast – 7 Steps to Engineering Powerful Personal and Professional Goals – EYOS Part 1 of 7

TECC 022: The Engineering Career Coach Podcast – How to Identify Burnout in Your Engineering Career Before It Happens and What to Do to Get Back on Track

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Engineering Management Institute

In this session of The Engineering Career Coach Podcast, I interview Stephanie Cook, an environmental engineer who now helps professionals avoid burnout in their careers by improving their diet and exercise habits.

Engineering Management InstituteStephanie discusses five signs that you’re headed for trouble and gives eight strategies for avoiding burnout or getting back on track if you’ve already gone too far.

“I promise you nothing is as chaotic as it seems. Nothing is worth diminishing your health. Nothing is worth poisoning yourself into stress, anxiety, and fear.” – Steve Maraboli

The career-changing tip at the end of the show will provide you with one simple thing that you can do every day to reduce your stress levels dramatically.

Listen to this session and learn: [Read more…] about TECC 022: The Engineering Career Coach Podcast – How to Identify Burnout in Your Engineering Career Before It Happens and What to Do to Get Back on Track

If You Set Lofty Goals, You Will Engineer Their Reality

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I often talk to our Institute for Engineering Career Development (IECD) members about setting lofty goals in their engineering careers. When I say “lofty,” I mean really big goals, goals that on first thought might even seem unreachable. Once you set these types of goals, it is imperative that you remind yourself of them over and over again, ideally on a daily basis. This can be done through a journal or some other tool capturing your thoughts and goals. I am not just telling IECD members to do this because it is written about in many books, I am telling them this because I have seen it work firsthand in my career and life. In this post, I am going to share three real-life examples from my own experiences.

When you set goals and then keep them fresh in your mind, you start to train yourself both mentally and physically to constantly move towards those goals, whether you realize it or not. At times, actions may even be driven by your subconscious mind because you have trained it as to what direction you want to head in your career and life.



Obtaining My PE License

I knew from the day I graduated college—in fact, I knew before that—that I wanted to get my professional engineering license. Because this was such a clear goal of mine, I was always preparing myself for the exam, even years before I took it. I kept a very good record of all of the projects I worked on from as soon as I started my career. I made sure that I was clear on the kind of engineering work that the state board expected on a PE application, and I made sure that was the work I did. Early on, I obtained an application from a colleague was previously approved to sit for the exam to ensure I completed mine in the same format. Then, when it came time to study for the PE exam, believe or not, I typed out the words Anthony Fasano, PE, and taped them to the top of my computer monitor so that I stared at them all day. Not only did this remind me of my goal, but whenever I tried to come up with a reason not to study, my goal was staring me in the face driving me to do so. The bottom line is that I took and passed the exam on my first attempt and became one of the youngest people to do so in the State of New York at the age of 24. [Read more…] about If You Set Lofty Goals, You Will Engineer Their Reality

The Emotionally Brilliant Engineer

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The Emotionally Brilliant Engineer

This is a guest post by Pat Sweet.

Over at my Engineering and Leadership blog, I tend to talk quite a bit about how business skills can be applied to the daily work of an engineer so thatengineers can be more productive, more purpose-driven, and more satisfied in their roles.

Today, I wanted to share one of these concepts I’ve borrowed from the world of business and show you why it might be the single most important thing you need to develop this year.

Harvard Business Review’s Top 10

My wife gifted me an excellent little book recently. It’s a collection of Harvard Business Review’s all-time top ten articles on leadership. It features some of the greatest business minds of all time, like Peter Drucker and Jim Collins.

I was struck by an article written by Daniel Goleman called “What makes a leader?” Goleman argues that, once people makes it to the executive level of a company, what distinguishes a successful person from an unsuccessful one is their emotional intelligence, not their technical skill or cognitive ability. [Read more…] about The Emotionally Brilliant Engineer

Setting Big Picture Engineering Career Goals is the Most Important Thing You Can Do in Your Career and Life

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engineering career goals

Engineers like data because it provides facts that they can use to do analyses. Well, I have some data in this post that I believe can be extremely useful to you in your engineering career and life overall.

I have provided career coaching and speaking services to hundreds of engineers in recent years, and my work has proven something that I find mind-boggling. Most engineers, probably around 90% of the ones I have worked with, DO NOT HAVE career or personal goals. How is that possible? What do they strive for? When important career and/or life decisions arise, what is their basis for making a decision? There are no clear answers for these questions, but based on my experience, one thing is clear: engineers without goals usually lack engagement in their day-to-day activities, exhibit signs of stress, and/or experience constant feelings of being overwhelmed.

If you are like most engineers, you don’t have the time to sit down and spend hours setting engineering career goals, so in this post, I will give you a simple process for setting the most important goals of your life. Let me preface this by saying that I do not believe in a clear separation of work life and personal/family life. It is my belief that in order to be as happy as you can be in your engineering career and life, you must be yourself all day, every day. There is no switch that you flip when you leave the office to turn off your work personality. In fact, if you find yourself bored or disengaged at work, that may be a big reason why. Many people might argue with me on this point (feel free to do so by leaving a comment below), but I have seen too many real-life examples of this to believe otherwise.

Here are your three steps for setting big picture goals that will ensure you stay engaged and fulfilled, both at your engineering job and at home. [Read more…] about Setting Big Picture Engineering Career Goals is the Most Important Thing You Can Do in Your Career and Life