This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee
There comes a time in every engineer’s career where they’ll want to take their roles to the next level by managing others, overseeing projects, and even running their own engineering startups. It’s a given that to catapult your engineering career, you have to do what’s necessary to be successful in outshining the rest, and sometimes that calls for identifying and fine-tuning the skills companies need. Research shows that companies desire soft skills, such as complex problem-solving, people management, creativity, and critical thinking—four essential soft skills that are projected to be the top desired soft skills by 2020. While these skills are essential for being successful in your engineering career, they often overshadow the uncommon engineering skills that engineers need to achieve exceptional success the way Apple’s Tim Cook or Tesla’s Elon Musk did.
Yet, everyone can’t transform into Elon Musk overnight. If you want to accomplish extraordinary success, you have to look beyond the ordinary. You won’t achieve far-reaching goals by simply working harder or longer hours than everyone else on the job. Instead, shift your focus to developing the unconventional skills that engineers often neglect. Here are three uncommon skills every engineer needs to achieve next-level success:
Whether you want to become a project manager or not, you’ll be running a project at some point in your life and in one of your capacities. It might be in the role you hold at your firm, or in the role you occupy in a technical or professional organization, or even a role you fill in a community group. The point is, many of activities we undertake are projects. That is, they are what Project Management International (PMI) defines as a, temporary in that it has a defined beginning and end in time, and therefore defined scope and resources. A project is unique in that it is not a routine operation, but a specific set of operations designed to accomplish a singular goal.
