Engineering Management Institute

Rae Taylor

The Five-Day Week Is a Construct, so Why Not a Four-Day Week?

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This is a guest post by Dr. Rae Taylor

Four-Day WeekMaybe I should start by saying that I am all for the four-day workweek/three-day weekend. If that makes it sound like I’m trying to get out of work, I’d like to point out that I have been called a workaholic by three different bosses. In fact, one of those bosses refused my request to go part time because “part time would mean I start working 40 hours a week. And that’s still not right.”

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “Isn’t this the person who just reminded us about the shortage of engineers? And now she wants to let them work less?” Yes, I did just do that, and thank you for reading and remembering, but maybe this new topic could be one step in helping solve that problem. If engineers are retiring early, leaving to change careers, or not entering the workforce at all, then maybe we need to rethink fundamental things like the standard workload.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about this, and it’s a real concern that I think keeps getting overlooked. And frankly, this highlights the relatively shortsighted nature of business. Engineering, no matter the subdiscipline, requires a lengthy training process. I remember sitting through talks at university on how to gain chartership and being a little crushed to think that after all these years of school and exams, I would finally get to go out into the world of work, but would still have to do school and exams for yet another three to … infinity years. If we can’t get engineers trained faster (which we can’t), then we have to try our best to keep the ones we have. We need ways to keep people motivated and productive, and ways to reduce the burnout rate.

four-day week

So from the woman who brought you “Networking Is Hard, but Chatting Is Easy”, we now get “The five-day week is a construct, so why not a four-day week?”

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There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

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This is a guest post by Dr. Rae Taylor

lunchI believe there is a general consensus that buying pizza for the office leads to an unquantifiable increase in office morale. I would extend this further and say that in general, food is a great motivator and healthy food, being an energy sustainer, is by extension a visible morale booster. I once bought some snack bars and jerky for a crew to take with them to a tricky access site. When the crew was loading up the van, I could hear excited mutterings like, “Are these really for us?” and “Hey, have you seen that we have snacks?” As if it wasn’t pretty much the easiest thing that I could have done for them.

Some larger (mostly tech) companies take the morale boost one step further and provide free (or at least heavily subsidized) food courts for their employees. They tend to offer a variety of meal options, often including many healthy options too. This is, of course, a trap to make the staff stay longer in the office in the hope that they will work more hours. But because people do work long hours, it’s incredibly useful. It is also costly and unrealistic for most companies to do.

I was thinking about this while watching the new season of “Queer Eye” (do not judge unless you are also up every few hours feeding a newborn and need something to keep you awake that you don’t have to focus on). With the increase in the number of hours we work and commute came a huge increase in people saying they don’t have the time to cook or grocery shop. As such, they rely on fast food and take-out, which tends to be less healthy. In the show, a member of the makeover team shows the recipient how to cook something that’s easy to make, healthy, and tasty. This made me think about how much I would have loved this kind of guidance when I was working crazy hours, and thinking about it more, how much I would love it even now that my schedule is more relaxed, albeit fuller.

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Civil Engineers Are in High Demand

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This is a guest post by Dr. Rae Taylor

I am a member of the social networking site “Nextdoor” (I call it a nosy neighbor site). I joined for the COVID updates and to volunteer my superpowers as a relatively young, low-COVID-risk person. But I stayed for the complete insanity that is village gossip. I was a little shocked to get a notification from my county saying “Civil Engineers!!! We need you!” I clicked on the post and it sounded a little desperate. It seems my county doesn’t mind what stage of your career you are in, what area of civil engineering you are in, or even if you get your job ads from a site used primarily to discuss whose dog is barking at what time.

In the same week, I got an email from a city not too far from me, where I had unsuccessfully applied for a job in 2016, asking me if I would like to apply for a job again. They provided a link to the job they were thinking about, but stressed that if anything else caught my eye I should apply for that too.

The following week I got two messages on LinkedIn from recruiters about civil engineering jobs, located about two hours away, that they thought I might like to apply for.

Now is a good time to point out that while I have worked as a civil engineer before, until now I have never been recruited as one. There is a convincing argument that when you get a Ph.D., you will no longer be a good engineer. Clearly this is an oversimplification, and an enjoyable discussion can be had on this. But I would say that I can’t think of a person I know, or know of (other than me), who has done graduate-level research and then gone into an EIT or P.E. role exclusively. So it should make sense when I tell you that previously, all the messages I got recruiting me to apply for a job were for jobs in R&D, teaching and talking about research, or in one fun case setting up experiments for a TV show. But not civil engineering jobs. As such, these latest recruiting messages conjured up visions of a barrel and an entire HR department reaching as far as they can to the base.

So what’s happening and should we be worried? Well, lots, and yes, always.

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Professional Engineering Societies Must Do a Better Job Communicating the Benefits They Offer

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This is a guest post by Dr. Rae Taylor

I was reminded the other day to investigate my professional memberships — what I wanted to renew and what I wanted to let lapse. You may think I was reminded by an email or letter from the institute, but sadly it wasn’t anything that normal. I was actually reminded while writing my daughter’s name on a toy ID badge. There was enough room for her name and fake academic credentials, but none left for professional affiliations. It left me wondering what I would write myself, as it’s been so long since I wrote them down, and they’re hard to remember since I move around a lot between institutions.

I guess I should state now that my professional affiliation has lapsed. I was a member of a civil engineering specific society, but after I left my full-time job and became a part-time independent scientist/homeschooler/full-time daycare teacher/older neighbor welfare checker, the $245 membership fee seemed too high. Now, to be fair, this organization does provide one year of free membership should you find yourself no longer gainfully employed, which is brilliant. I applied for it and heard nothing back. I assume they were inundated with applications as many people were losing their jobs at that time.

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The Benefits and Downsides of Wage Transparency

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This is a guest post by Dr. Rae Taylor

I have little issue with telling people what I get paid unless they ask. I think this juxtaposition comes from the age-old question of nature vs. nurture as I was raised to never talk about money, not even to family members. That’s the nurture. But when I was applying for my first “grown-up” job, I experienced firsthand how difficult it is to negotiate compensation without knowing how much peer employees are paid. That’s … well, that’s more nurture, I guess. Anyway, while I was interviewing for positions, I collected all the information I could find on average salaries for recent engineering graduates. Unfortunately, there was such a huge variation in the reported values that they were useless. So, I decided to break the ultimate wage transparency taboo. I walked up to a person in my graduating year, job offers in hand, and asked if we could chat about salaries.

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Career Fear (And How to Overcome It)

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This is a guest post by Dr. Rae Taylor

In an earlier blog, I alluded to the vicious cycle of thinking you can’t study, which will guarantee that you actually can’t study. Some people messaged me about this and it got me thinking about the games our minds play on us.

A few years back, I made the decision to leave my job and start on a new path. Initially, I was over-excited by all the opportunities out there. At one point I turned down exciting new possibilities simply because I had committed to too many currently exciting possibilities. But then over time, having had to pick a path and stick to it, I froze. It didn’t matter what new opportunity came along — I assumed I would fail at it, so what was the point in trying?

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Should Engineers Work From Home More?

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This is a guest post by Dr. Rae Taylor

No, really, I’m asking. I’m on the fence on this one.

I understand there are many jobs that can’t be done from home. One of them being civil engineer. I used to be a microscopist. I can’t imagine even asking for “work from home day”’ in that job. But there are definite aspects of being an engineer that can be done from home. And I would strongly argue that they can be done better that way. Having a day at home once a week, without interruption, to get some planning done, catch up on paperwork, write reports, or design in peace would certainly be useful. On the flip side, what about all the potential interruptions?

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Don’t Let Age Put You Off: Study

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This is a guest post by Dr. Rae Taylor

Before I sat down to start studying for the FE exam, I did a lot of prep research. I read everything I could about the exam itself: what was in it, how to book it, what equations would be given, and which ones should just be memorized. I also read everything I could in the way of personal experiences: how difficult people found the test, how much prep work they did, what resources they used. This was mostly Reddit reading. I like to call it r/r/r r/research/reading. It’s like normal research, but done exclusively on Reddit, and as such can’t be trusted.

One big thing I was looking for was the total amount of required study time. Like all people, I have other things going on in my life, so I wanted a rough idea of how many hours I would need to study, so that I could estimate an exam date. There is clearly a huge range in the amount of studying people do for the FE exam. Many factors come into play, such as how long you’ve been out of school, how well you did in school, if you moved out of industry and then back in, and whether you go it alone or take an exam prep course. Based on everything I read, I settled on an estimate of six months of studying, with 10 to 12 hours a week. It sounded like a lot, but that would allow for some weeks of decreased studying due to other commitments and some weeks of just not being bothered.

One thing I didn’t think about and didn’t read about was studying while being older. You might ask if that is the same thing as having been out of school for some time, which I already mentioned above. I would say that they are related, but different. Maybe two sides of the same coin. For me, how long you’ve been out of school just tells me how long it’s been since you’ve taken a course on something. Maybe you’ve been working as an engineer, but in a particular subfield, and haven’t seen this material for a few years. Being older is different.

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I’m Now Allowed to Sit For the Civil FE Exam

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This is a guest post by Dr. Rae Taylor

In 2011, I moved from England to the USA to take a postdoctoral research position at the University of California Berkeley. It was going to be a year full of world-class research, performed at a fantastic university, topped off with backpacking, hiking, biking, and trail running. Other than buying flights, I made pretty much no other preparations. A year later, still going strong in both research and hiking, I renewed my contract and my visa. Then again the next year, and again the one after that.

Fast forward many years, and I have left academia, married an American, live in the state of Washington, and am looking for an engineering job. Many (but not all) of the jobs that I see posted require an EIT. Armed with Google and an unlimited text messaging plan, I start trying to figure out what exactly an EIT is. Despite the strong agreement between my Google results and the boatload of texts from my U.S. engineering friends, I couldn’t believe that people willingly take a six-hour exam on everything they learned during their undergraduate engineering degree. At the time, I thought that seemed super-intense and not something I needed to do right then, so maybe I could put it aside and not think about it.

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Should My LinkedIn Profile and My Resume Have a Motherhood Section?

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This is a guest post by Dr. Rae Taylor

LinkedIn Profile

It’s always been known that having kids can be detrimental to a woman’s career. There is more research that can be cited here that women pay a price for having a family, whether it be reduced promotional prospects or a complete loss of career.

Maybe this is why I’ve always been told not to talk about having or wanting kids. I’ve even been advised to not mention being married and of childbearing age. One charming man once told me he wasn’t going to teach me anything because I would get myself pregnant and then have to leave, so what was the point? Side note here: I taught him Excel, Word, and some other software, but I guess being months from retirement, which he talked about constantly, he wasn’t going to go get himself pregnant, so I was safe in the knowledge that my efforts wouldn’t be wasted.

In the interest of never talking about having kids, let’s talk about motherhood instead, and if that should be on resumes. I haven’t been thinking about this at all while applying for jobs. I’ve been thinking about selling myself in the best possible light to all possible employers. But then the BBC asked me if motherhood belongs on a resume. I said “Yes, it does!’’ But I said it in the way you do when what you mean it, “Someone else should do that and break that glass ceiling for all the mothers out there, but not me, because I actually want a job.”

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