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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.
Whether project management or organizational management, the foundation of a great management career starts with exceptional technical/professional performance. Many engineering professionals start their careers with strong technical skills, honed through years of schooling, challenging work assignments, and delivering on project management expectations. Moving into a project or organizational management role takes a new set of skills, which can be developed long before acquiring the manager title.
Through developing professional consulting competencies engineers can accelerate their skill development while providing additional contribution to their firms. Also, it allows early career engineers to demonstrate their people skills to those internal decision makers, who may be making those promotional decisions.
So what specifically are professional consulting competencies? After talking with and listening to many junior and senior professional consultants in the A/E industry, I developed a 10-competency model that can be used to guide any engineer in their role as a professional consultant. Executing on technical skills and abilities can develop the first four, the next five require focus on people. Pursuing self-development is important regardless of your career goals.
“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 provide coaching and guidance to an engineer who is totally burnt out in his career. By the end of this episode, he is inspired and has a plan to change his career for the better. He then also adds a twist to this episode and starts asking me some career-related questions on the decisions I made in my career.
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In episode 92 of The Civil Engineering Podcast, I am taking you with me to visit T&M Associates headquarters in Middletown NJ, where we are going to sit down with Ihsan Al-Fayyomi to talk about business development skill building for civil engineers.
Leadership skills are crucial for engineers looking to take on more responsibility, and move into management. If you’ve ever read this blog, or anything I’ve written on leadership in the past, you’ll already know that.
What you might not know is how to develop your leadership skills. This is a constant struggle for engineers looking to break into leadership roles – how can you grow to become a leader if nobody gives you the chance to develop those skills in the first place? How you can get leadership experience if all leadership roles require previous leadership experience?
Today, I’m going to share five ways that you can grow your leadership skills, regardless of whether you already have a formal leadership role at work or not. Pursuing just one of these ideas over the next year can do amazing things for you personally and your ability to lead others.
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In episode 082 of The Civil Engineering Podcast, I talk with Alexis Clark, E.I.T about her passion for culture and community in civil engineering, and several other interesting topics related to Civil Engineering.
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In this episode, I talk to Fernando Ceballos, a Civil Engineer, as part of our what I have been calling our Game Changing Career Moves series and we will be talking about taking ownership of your professional development through community involvement.
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In this session of The Engineering Career Coach Podcast I am going to answer questions from our listeners on how to make career changes or shifts in your engineering career.
Question:
Answer:
