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Doing what you Love Doing in your Engineering Careers – Engineering Career TV Ep. 6

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Q: What happens if your engineering company is not letting you do what love doing in your engineering careers?

Welcome to Episode #6 of Engineering Career TV. The topic for this episode is Doing what you Love Doing in your Engineering Careers.

I will spend most of the Engineering Career TV episodes answering questions that have been submitted from engineers around the world on how to rapidly advance their careers and live the lives they want to live.

You can submit questions for the show by clicking here.

Let’s jump into today’s topic, Doing what you Love Doing in your Engineering Careers, which is the second part to a question we answered in the last episode from Tessa who’s a recent graduate, where she asks the following: [Read more…] about Doing what you Love Doing in your Engineering Careers – Engineering Career TV Ep. 6

What are Your Leverage Points in Your Engineering Career?

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leverage

There are several definitions in the dictionary for the word leverage, but the one I like the most is: use (something) to maximum advantage.

Because your most limited resource is time, I would recommend that in your engineering career and life, you leverage your time.  In other words, you use your time to gain maximum advantage.

I recently was coaching a senior engineer, and he was telling me about a huge challenge that he had with his team, around predicting future workload.  After talking to him for 15 minutes, I realized that his challenge wasn’t this problem, it was the fact that he didn’t have enough time to solve the problem.  He was spending his time on other things, that were in my opinion, not as critical.

In this article, I want to give you three items to consider when thinking about how to spend your time.  Think about a lever that you can pull.  The longer the lever, the stronger the force.  In this situation, the length of the lever is directly related to the importance of what you decide to work on, and the impact that task can have…

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5 Ways to Protect Yourself from Other People’s Stress

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stress

It’s a fact for every engineer, in either an academic or professional setting, that stress will be present.  Because this is the case, you can either view it as a horrific pollutant or accept it as fact and design a way to mitigate or absorb it.  I suggest the later approach.  Remove any negative or positive connotation around stress and let’s develop a way to manage it effectively in our engineering career.

Designing and utilizing a system for how you will handle both self-inflicted and external stressors is essential.  It’s going to be a main determinant in your ability to advance professionally and it’s going to play a key component in how fulfilled and happy you are with life in general.

Professionally, advancement goes to those who have the ability to manage increasing levels and complexity of responsibility.  With responsibility comes stress:  finding new business opportunities, making payroll, handling personnel problems, fulfilling expectations of demanding clients.  If you do not have a means for effectively mitigating or absorbing stress, then the further you move along the professional advancement trajectory, the more likely it is that you’ll eventually hit a brick wall that will result in unintended consequences.  What do these look like?  Negative attitude; curt and unprofessional responses to colleagues and clients; and generally being cancerous in communicating and working with teams or subordinates.

TBStress

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3 Reasons to Design Gratitude Into Your Engineering Career

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Do you operate with a zero-sum mindset in your engineering career?  Do you believe that there is only so much pie to go around and if someone else gets it, you won’t get yours? Or, do you operate with a both/and mindset? That is, do you believe that there is adequate opportunity to support both you and everyone else? As it turns out, the type of mindset you operate in, will determine the level of performance you will bring to your work and the opportunities you’ll create for yourself. [Read more…] about 3 Reasons to Design Gratitude Into Your Engineering Career