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How Important is your First Engineering Job – Engineering Career TV Ep. 25

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Q: How Important is your First Engineering Job?

Welcome to Episode #25 of Engineering Career TV. The topic for this episode is how important is your first engineering job.

I 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: how important is your first engineering job, which is based on a question from Joe, who asks the following:
[Read more…] about How Important is your First Engineering Job – Engineering Career TV Ep. 25

Don’t Let Lack of Experience Keep You From Speaking With Authority as an Engineer

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This is Part I of a six-part series on debunking misconceptions about leadership and speaking with authority for engineers preparing for their first professional leadership role.

Speaking With Authority

Starting out in any endeavor you lack experience.  In business, in relationships, in your technical pursuits – doesn’t matter.  You enter into everything you do for the first time without experience and the only way to get the experience is to go out into the world and just do it.  As it is in every undertaking in life, so it is with leadership.

I didn’t begin feeling entirely confident in leading others until well into my military career.  It wasn’t that I lacked the theory of leadership or mentors or the opportunities to lead while in college ROTC.  My lack of confidence in my leading ability came from one gap:  experience.  The training I had while at college prepared me by providing me with a body of knowledge about leadership.  The hands-on experiences leading other people and projects came many years later.

If you’ve not lead other people or a project before, you’ve still been exposed to this “experience gap”.  You’ve got the knowledge; you just lack the boots-on-ground aspect.  The good stuff that comes from experiencing it first-hand.

Before getting into the four components that helped me bridge the experience gap, a quote that’s stuck with me from early in my career: [Read more…] about Don’t Let Lack of Experience Keep You From Speaking With Authority as an Engineer

Learning Can Rapidly Advance Your Engineering Career – Here Are Four Steps for Learning and Implementation

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Learning and ImplementationI am a fast mover to say the least, and over the past few years, I think this has hurt me some. Don’t get me wrong, I get a lot of stuff done; however, I think at times I rush decisions just to keep a fast pace, and some of those decisions don’t best contribute to my goals.

To remedy this, as of recently, I have started to attend a lot of in-person conferences and training events. In a short time, this has proved to be career and life changing. While the events have contained some very valuable learning sessions, most of the big takeaways for me have come from conversations with successful people. Here are some lessons I have learned about learning, and most importantly about applying what I have learned: [Read more…] about Learning Can Rapidly Advance Your Engineering Career – Here Are Four Steps for Learning and Implementation