Mentoring Blog

16 Ways to Start Your Engineering Career on the Right Foot

Here are some helpful suggestions edited from Career Success in Engineering by Bernard Berson, P.E., F.NSPE, former NSPE president and Douglas Benner P.E., F.NSPE. The tips are focused on the new employee, but there is something here for all of us.

1. Be early to work; be prompt in the work environment. At college, if you violated these rules, you merely got behind the eight ball and had to play catch-up. On the job, violations of these rules can have more serious consequences.
2. Focus on the quality of your work. Even though there may not be time to be absolutely perfect, avoid mistakes as much as you reasonably can.
3. Hard work has multiple rewards: from your peers, your employer, and your clients. Other employees quickly note your energy level as well as your rate of learning. Don't wait to be spoon fed. Show lots of initiative. Show lots of interest. Make your manager a success.
4. Expect difficult, complicated, and multidisciplinary problems.
5. Make a concerted effort to understand how your work impacts the overall product or project. This will instill a strong feeling of the importance of your efforts. It also gives you insights into how you can expand the scope of your work.
6. Learn to be business oriented. Learn the economics of your organization. Learn about your organization's competition.
7. Define your short-term and long-term career goals, but don't assume every assignment must be strongly supportive of those goals. When an assignment is not strongly supportive, consider it to be a stepping stone on your career path. What are your career goals? How will you attain them?
8. Continuously analyze and understand your personal SWOTs. What are your STRENGTHS? What are your WEAKNESSES? What are the best OPPORTUNITIES to enhance your career? What—and possibly who—are THREATS to your career advancement, and how will you deal with these?
9. Develop your personal vision; this is very important. What is your future goal, i.e. management or technical? What can you do to attain that goal? What do you want to do with your life? What do you want to be doing in 10, 20, or 30 years?
10. You are your own career manager; ask for regular feedback. The practice of your employer working with you to map out a career plan is over. You are the CEO of your career. You need to assume this responsibility starting on day one of your new job. Learn to work and network in the new multicultural and multinational environment.
11. Be open to ideas from everywhere. Think of your brain like a sponge, and absorb as much as you can as fast as you can. Learn to network with as many people and resources as possible.
12. Learn to be a team player, especially where the team must deal with conflict and team members seem to have different agendas.
13. Have unyielding integrity. Ethics in the engineering environment is very important to you and to your company. Many companies now have a code of conduct. Be familiar with the Engineers’ Creed.
14. Support your technical society and your university. Your technical society is a great resource for networking. Also, you need to give back to your university and to your profession.
15. Seek a mentoring relationship. You need to take a proactive role in seeking a mentor, which often is described as a trusted counselor or teacher, especially in occupational settings. This is normally not your current supervisor, who is responsible for your work or a trainer who is responsible to teach you specific skills.
16. Have fun! Find outlet activities that supplement and complement your career interests.

Achieving Goals: Are You Using the Design-Build Process?

By Chris Knutson, P.E.

Setting goals is an action every successful leader must do for themselves and the team they lead. Failing to set goals leads to stagnation and a life of reaction. And although leaders react, that’s not their normal operating mode. Leaders set goals to shape the future. As an engineer, I like the thought that setting and achieving goals builds the future I want to experience. In fact, I view goal setting in the context of the design-build process for construction. One entity (you) designs the goal and that same entity (you) constructs it. A unified work flow from initial concept to final product. Nice.

If setting and achieving goals leads to the future you will experience, then it’s a good idea to invest time in designing what your future will look like. As any good design-build team knows, one must invest effort to meet the client’s requirements. If there are specific objectives you want to achieve, then get focused on your goal development.

Four goal setting action drills that I’ve found useful are:

1. Goal Difficulty. Start with goals that are realistic and achievable. This goes for you alone or as a team lead. Once you build confidence knocking-out small goals, start stretching by increasing the difficulty of the goals. This in turn increases the energy needed to meet the goal. This is called growth, and whether you apply it to yourself or your team, it’s a good thing. And it takes time, effort, and can sometimes be painful.

2. Goal Specificity. When goals are specific you and/or your team tend to be more focused. Telling yourself, “Hey, I’ll do my best” or being ambiguous about what you intend to achieve is an exercise in futility. Simply do what’s expected to meet the goal. If you actually want to see results, you need to be specific. You don’t design a structural member with ambiguity or toss asphalt mix design to chance. Why would you be ambiguous in specifying goals that affect your future?

3. Feedback. Think of this as construction management and inspection. You don’t build anything without inspection taking place to ensure that standards and plans are being adhered to. Why would you think that setting goals to build your future shouldn’t involve feedback? Securing feedback enhances the effects of goal setting. Performance feedback keeps you and your teams efforts focused on the final goal and encourages energy to achieve the goal. Feedback can come from your internal guidance system or outside input. If you’re serious about meeting a goal, then seek feedback, regardless if it’s painful.

4. Participation. If you don’t show up on the field, you can’t play. The same holds true in achieving goals. If you don’t make an effort, the goal is nothing more than empty words in the mind or on a piece of paper. You and/or your team have to show up to make the goal a reality—every day and with focused, positive energy.

Goal setting is something every one of us does daily, sometimes subconsciously. The grocery list, the Saturday morning errands...these are goals, but immediate goals. The BIG goals—the ones you want to achieve to expand your knowledge, wisdom, career—these take a conscious effort.

As a final shot on goal setting, I offer a few additional thoughts. I’ve come to view these as absolutely vital to making success appear from any goal:

• Your goals need to be expressed in positive terms.
• Your goals need to be posted in a prominent place so you can stay focused on them constantly. If you’re embarrassed to share the goal, then it’s not a goal but a fantasy.
• The goals must be your own. In the words of Judy Garland, “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.” Don’t imitate or borrow.
• Be flexible, your situations and goals can and will change as life circumstances change. In other words, life changes; flow with it.

NSPE member Chris Knutson, P.E., has over 17 years in the U.S. Air Force as an engineer officer and currently serves as a lieutenant colonel commanding a civil engineer squadron in New Mexico. He is a member of the NSPE Mentoring Task Force.