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Can old dogs retrofit, retool and recalibrate for global economics?

February 21, 2010 By 2 Comments

Current engineering students are very, very fortunate. They are beneficiaries of the growing momentum of change in engineering education.This growing momentum focuses not only on engineering curricula but also on preparing engineers for the context in which they will practice engineering. This preparation includes emphasis on the complementary skill sets they will need to develop in order to communicate and implement engineering solutions.

National programs and professional organizations are focusing on acclimating and introducing grade school students to engineering as a career. Demystifying what engineering education is all about, and breaking down perceptual barriers surrounding engineers, may lead to increased interest and enrollment in math and engineering programs at the university level. What a great horizon to set sail for!

What about the engineers currently in the workforce? Or, quite frankly, engineers displaced from the workforce in 2009? How can the changing perspective in engineering education be incorporated to assist the current engineering workforce in becoming globally competitive or find another position? These engineers are the folks that have to hold the course as momentum builds and advances for the next generation of engineers. And, like the two lead sled dogs from the team I had the pleasure of driving several weeks ago, younger dogs with lead potential are harnessed with older, more experienced lead dogs to - literally - learn the ropes.

We all approach the care and feeding of our undergraduate and graduate education differently, regardless of the academic discipline we pursued. Some of us take the core courses and focus on becoming masters of tactical solutions.Some of us cross-train because we want to incorporate other disciplines into our perspective. Some of us are researchers, others are teachers and yet others are practitioners of our discipline. This diversity in each student’s approach, regardless of the year in which they received their technical degree, is what leads to innovation and collaboration. In other words, diverse course offerings have always been available to all generations of engineers. However, as the current global economic paradigm takes form, the choices of courses you take, especially those for technical fields such as engineering, become more important. Even if you are an old dog.

It’s interesting how many business development and sales books have been written and are purchased and embraced by individuals in these disciplines. Regardless of whether they have a technical degree or not. Business development professionals (and yes, those pesky sales folks) may be more open to finding new tools of the trade than individuals in technical positions.Or perhaps the manner in which business development and sales professionals learn, assimilate and retrofit their habits lends itself to continuous change. Or at least searching for the next “latest and greatest sales technique.”

On the other side of the spectrum are folks who are predominantly technically oriented. And for the engineer who has been in the trenches practicing for years and years, the discipline and rigor of how problems are approached may present a hurdle to retooling, recalibrating and retrofitting their engineering toolkit. They truly are the masters of their discipline and have trained their brain over the years to solve problems in a specific manner.

With the emphasis in engineering education on not only what engineering students learn but also how they learn, today’s engineers may benefit from continuing education courses.There is probably less of a generational span involved at the student – professor interface in retooling today’s engineers, while educational efforts focus on recalibrating curricula for students graduating between 2010 and 2020. And today’s engineers have one thing that today’s engineering students don’t have: experience in the field. And lots of it.

Instead of thinking of yourself as a displaced engineer or a business owner behind the 8-ball of business development, what about regarding yourself as a resource to future engineering students?Ask yourself:

1.)How can I contribute my years of experience to the academic experience of grade-schoolers, high schoolers and college undergrads?

2.)What types of non-credit continuing education courses are available at my local university’s engineering school, where I can be on the receiving end of current advancements in engineering education and my contributions to class discussion provide a real-world context for my classmates?

3.)What stewardship programs are offered by the local chapter of my professional organization, such as technology competitions, field trips to manufacturers, etc.? How can I become involved with these initiatives?

4.)Is there an opportunity for me to mentor grade school science programs, or even teach at the grade school or high school level?

5.)How can I best work with vocational training programs to impact the quality of technical graduates?

Just some food for thought. The engineering discipline seeks discrete answers for tactical solutions. Instead of differentiating engineers based on age, academic, or professional discipline, I encourage you to think about the similarities across the entire engineering continuum.Retrofitting, retooling and recalibration usually involves taking parts from lots of different machines and incorporating a cross-functional perspective into implementing the desired solution.

Who else can determine the best pathway for retrofitting, retooling and recalibrating career development – for themselves and for others – than an engineer?

Think about it.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Core Capabilities, Core Personal Values, Engineering, sales engineering, Soft Skills, Weblogs Tagged With: , , , , ,

Survival of the Fittest within The Workplace Revisited

February 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

We are in the midst of economic recalibration. No surprises there.  For engineers who remain employed by the same companies they worked for in 2009, congratulations. For those engineers displaced in 2009, many of you have started your own consulting practices or are seeking in a new position.  And while I wish you all best of luck, there is more than luck involved, regardless of whether your workplace is your employer’s office or your home office.

What does it take to survive in the 2010 engineering workplace? There are many how-to business books and engineering blogs, including this one, that consider this important question. Engineering schools are pondering just what engineering education looks like in 2010 and onward. Professional development is a function of what you learned in school combined with implementing self-realization after you graduate.

In other words, what do you need to know to be effective within the CONTEXT in which you practice engineering?

CONTEXT is important. It affects personal output and productivity. CONTEXT defines the types of decisions we make on behalf of our clients and ourselves. Let’s face it, we don’t make decisions in a vacuum.

Survival of the fittest within the context of the workplace involves consistency. And I’m not talking about the rate of adoption of herd mentality.  While it’s been said that corporations foster individuals falling in the middle of the performance curve, 2009 taught us that mediocrity doesn’t afford anyone a hiding place. Engineers who felt their post-graduate degrees and certifications would insure job security were displaced.  Engineers hiding in the middle of the curve were thrust into business development roles to pick up the slack of displaced individuals at their companies.

Survival of the fittest within the workplace involves incorporating new skill sets, to the best of everyone’s ability, into the existing framework of the engineering mindset. Now that’s a lot to think about.

Survival of the fittest within the workplace incorporates cross-training your brain and engaging in risk taking, even when all the factors impacting decision making haven’t been defined. And this mindset goes against the grain of the  tactical discipline required of engineering mindset.

Survival of the fittest within the workplace implies the engineer assumes responsibility for his/her continuing education and professional development.  Yes, you read that correctly. It’s your responsibility. Your organization may recognize and support continuing education courses or certifications. However, you may need to self-finance your continuing education, presenting a short-term economic downside on your part, for longer term gain in terms of career development.

Survival of the fittest within the workplace demands a different relationship between students and educators, depending on the nature of – and the timing of - a student’s post graduate education. Not every engineering student is going to be able to afford a straight shot from undergrad through graduate and post-graduate studies. And not every engineering student has a clear-cut sense of self, their true area of specialization or “what they really want to be when they grow up.”

Survival of the fittest within the context of the workplace involves becoming a perpetual student – or at least making the commitment to becoming a life-long learner.  Whether you are white collar or blue collar, work in a machine shop or own the machine shop - or have a dream about buying the machine shop in which you work -  success involves placing a premium in self-improvement and continuous learning .  

And continuous learning includes picking up the newspaper (hard copy or via Internet) and reading about industry trends and, well, news.

We need to broaden our CONTEXTS. We all need to become better at learning and connecting the dots, and not just those in front of our professional noses. We need to understand the interrelationship between what we read, professionally, and what we hear in terms of news.  Have you ever considered the impact of discussing the daily news with folks over lunch – presenting your opinion and defending or challenging or building upon an idea?  That lunchtime discussion group can become the fulcrum for continuing education, not to mention improved skill sets in terms of communication and presentation. 

Survival of the fittest within the workplace doesn’t have to feel like a continuous uphill battle. It’s where and how you seek knowledge, constantly, and how you incorporate it, that can make a tremendous difference in who you are.  Being a lifelong learner has to do with being curious and inquisitive, and engaging with others . Ultimately one’s ability to interact leads to confidence and personal development.

Life long learning is not performance art. Some folks treat their workplace demeanor like an ongoing act to sustain their employment. Life long learning is not taking one course after another – in a vacuum – and rarely sharing insights with others in an open, non-academic setting.

Think about it. Read the news. Pick up a book. Engage in discussions and dialectics. Make life long learning part of your personal culture. I guarantee you will be more interesting to yourself, as well as your co-workers. 

Does this sound like survival of the fittest within the workplace? I don’t think so.  

Sounds more like the habits of an individual who is interested in learning about and from others. That’s a person I want to get to know. That’s a person I want to collaborate with.

What are you waiting for?

Filed Under: Core Capabilities, Core Personal Values, Engineering, Job Functionality, Sales, sales engineering, Weblogs Tagged With: , , , , ,

What kind of engineer are you?

February 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment

 

How would you describe yourself, and what you bring to the table, to: 

1.)a prospective employer, 2.)a prospective customer, 3.)a colleague at a professional association, 4.)someone outside the engineering field, and/or 5.)an academician?

 

We know all engineers are not the same. Everyone brings a little something different to the table. So even in companies full of engineers, those engineers aren’t all cut from the same mold. The corporate toolkit is full of engineers who won’t see the light of day unless there are special circumstances. Some engineers are the day-in-and-day-out individual who brings consistency, but perhaps not creativity or increase in revenue, to the table. How do you utilize this toolkit? How do you evaluate your own toolkit? How do you let others (professors, employers) understand your skill sets and how to strategically, as well as tactically, best utilize what you bring to the table?

How would you describe the type of work that you prefer to do? Do you:

a)prefer to sit in a cubicle and solve abstract problems? Without any consequences to your deliverables? (Hint: do you pay for yourself?)

b)prefer to sit in a cubicle and implement design solutions? Without any consequences to your deliverables? Do you pay for yourself?

c)prefer to leave the cubicle to interact with peers in engineering meetings? Taking the risk of engaging in discussion of your proposed solutions? Perhaps leading toward innovation that might pay for itself based on cost of development?

d)prefer to participate in multidisciplinary business development discussions with peers outside the engineering discipline? Incorporating differing perspectives into your personal toolkit? Perhaps leading to entrepreneurship that might pay for itself over time?

e)prefer to teach engineering to undergraduates and graduate students? Within a traditional academic setting. Which may impact the quality and output of engineering education?

f)prefer to teach engineering to post-grad or returning/retraining engineers? Within an evening college or community college setting? Which may impact the quality and output of manufacturing engineering?

 

The rules for evaluating what we bring to the table change once we leave academia. So be honest with yourself about the type of work you prefer to do. Once we enter the workforce, the practical meets the conceptual – and needs to be articulated to business owners. The business owner isn’t going to pass or fail us, or give us First Honors or Second Honors. They are simply going to choose whether or not to continue doing business with the company we either own or work for.And believe me, profit and loss considerations are far more profound than the difference between academic grades or Pass vs. Fail.One can’t sit for an exam again, later on, hoping to get a better mark. Especially after clients fire you because of cost overruns or failure to understand, from project inception, the scope of work involved.

Doing one’s specific job isn’t going to be enough for you to keep your job or retain your client base, not in this expanding global economy. While academia can prepare us all to do a competent job in the workforce, the CONTEXT for our work is provided by the setting in which we elect to contribute our talents. And while we may / may not have complete control over where we lend our skill sets (let’s face it, we are all grateful to be employed/educated), we do have control over how we can augment what we bring to the table.

So let’s be honest with our collective selves. How do we utilize the contexts of our work environments to develop our skill sets, our personal tool kits? If we are business owners, would we hire ourselves? If we are cubicle-sitters, how realistic is it for us to expect folks to feed and maintain us if we are uncomfortable explaining to business owners– in simple terms – the return on investment of our design solutions? What are our minimums and maximums? What are our tolerances?

How do we utilize the context of our current professional environment to improve our own processes, output and throughput? Are we continuing our education? Are we expanding our perspective? Or are we stagnating and expecting our own status quo to maintain us through a career… of how long?

Does graduating with an engineering degree define a set piece that is immutable over time? Keeping up with technology and translating it into how we think, making decisions and implementing our toolkit throughout our careers doesn’t end with graduation and job placement. It’s only the start.

What kind of engineer are you? Would you have hired yourself in the first place? And would you continue to employ yourself?

Think about it….

 

Filed Under: Core Capabilities, Core Personal Values, Engineering, Job Functionality, sales engineering, Sales-Engineering Interface™, Simultaneous Translation, Soft Skills, Weblogs Tagged With: , , , ,

What they DIDN’T teach you in engineering school.

February 1, 2010 By 9 Comments

I invited Masha V. Petrova to guest blog today. This year I am going to be exploring gaps in engineering education and their impact on the engineering-sales/business development interface. I couldn't think of anyone more insightful than Masha to kick things off, so I interviewed Masha!  Her responses to my questions follow.

Masha V. Petrova holds a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and is a founder and CEO of MVP Modeling Solutions.  Her weekly blog on a variety of engineering topics, can be found at http://mvpmodelingsolutions.com/mvpblog/ . Her blog on Increasing Your Professional Value can be found at http://successfulunemploymenttoolkit.com/blog/.

 

 

Babette: Masha, how well equipped were you, as a PhD engineer, to undertake a business development role in past companies you worked for as well as your current consulting company?

Masha: Aside from giving me a solid technical foundation, my engineering PhD did not prepare me for working in sales, marketing or for starting a company in any shape or form. Even for business development in a very technically oriented company, like MVP Modeling Solutions, skills completely unrelated to engineering become much more important. For example, being able to “see the big picture.” The process of getting a technical PhD teaches you the complete opposite – focusing on minute details, zeroing in on a very small focused area of research, looking at a very specific problem from every different angle, and researching your PhD topic to death.

Which is what you need to do, in order to conduct great research. Best technical papers focus on a very well defined problem and examine it from every possible angle. In business, especially small business, it is very important to have a big picture vision and to constantly correlate every action and task to that vision. They don’t teach you that in grad school.

Another thing grad school does not teach you, but that is crucial to a successful small company or to a consultant, is how to deal with people. In academia, especially in technical areas, the idea that being able to work with people is more important than your technical knowledge is seen as rather ridiculous. I cannot recall one piece of advice or knowledge from my instructors or from any of my classes that advised me how to work with other human beings effectively.

On the other hand, when I worked as a sales/marketing engineer at a software company, every single day I had an extensive lesson in human relationships and communication. And I can tell you from experience - learning people skills was harder then getting a PhD in Engineering.

Babette: As an undergraduate, how many courses did you take that cross-trained you to speak the language of business, as well as engineering?

Masha: None. Even though it was a great engineering program and graduates from my class went on to work in the corporate world right after graduation, we had practically zero preparation for any type of business related work. Sure, there were senior and junior design projects, where students worked with engineers in industry and where we had to adhere to a certain project budget. That’s about it. In fact our undergraduate curriculum, at the time, made it nearly impossible to have even a minor in any non-technical subject (such as business).

Babette: As a graduate student, were you encouraged to take marketing, sales or economics courses as well as grad engineering courses?

Masha: No. In fact, I knew of maybe one other student who took some courses after his requirement for the core engineering courses were completed. I enjoyed taking courses and continued signing up for various non-engineering courses until I graduated. But that was seen as rather strange and people kept asking me why I am bothering to learn stuff even though my course requirements for PhD were filled.

As grad students, no one really ever tried to explain to us how important it is to be able to understand the world of business and people relationships, whether you planned to stay in academia, work in industry or start your own company.

Babette: Would you say that your education was "typical" in terms of how engineers are trained, at least in the US?

Masha: For the most part, yes. I got a BS in Engineering from University of Delaware, although I did manage to sneak in a minor in Religious Studies. Which is probably not a typical minor for engineering students. That helped me enormously by developing written communication skills.

What was not typical in terms of my graduate career was that I had an absolutely amazing thesis advisor. Extremely knowledgeable and brilliant, he was also helpful, kind and liked by everyone who knew him. That’s a very rare find in academia. Professor Forman Williams is not a typical thesis advisor. I was very lucky.

Babette: What is the biggest disconnect, then, in terms of undergraduate engineers coming out of school and entering the workforce? Is this disconnect different after receiving a graduate degree? Why or why not?

Masha: I would say the largest disconnect was that in undergraduate school we were overwhelmed with to-do tasks. There were so many engineering courses to take, so much homework to do along with constant tests, that the main concern of an undergrad engineering student was to just get the tasks done. Typically, it was not to understand the subject in depth or to understand a particular problem, but to pick up just enough information out of the textbooks, and teaching assistants, to get the homework done and pass the tests.

Grad school taught me to think in depth about each subject I was studying and to actually understand what I was learning. However, neither grad nor undergrad education has prepared me for dealing with customers, dealing with a variety of people (not just other researchers), or understanding the sales, marketing and PR processes.

Babette: Should the structure of engineering education be amended in the future to create more engineers who are capable of assuming business development functions in today's global economy?

Masha: Most definitely. That would give engineering students an edge in the corporate world and would foster more pleasant working environments and increase creativity and innovation.

Babette: What advice would you give undergraduate engineering students in terms of preparing their skillset for a successful entry into the workforce?

Masha: No one is responsible for your education, except you. University may provide you with a curriculum, with instructors and with career fairs, but at the end it will be you looking for a job, working with people and putting food on your table. So take every opportunity to make sure that you’re prepared. Always look for internships and apply for them.If you’re on a semester schedule, there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t have a different internship lined up for every winter and summer semester.Take business, entrepreneurship and liberal arts courses if you can.

Babette: What advice would you give current engineering professionals in terms of career development as we move forward into 2010?

Masha: I don’t mean to sound like a commercial, but the www.SuccessfulUnemploymentToolkit.com is designed to provide engineers with tools to help fill the missing gaps that might have been left there by their engineering education. Take a look at the website and read the blog: www.SuccessfulUnemploymentToolkit.com/blog for more advice on increasing your value as an engineering professional.

Filed Under: Core Capabilities, Core Personal Values, Engineering, Job Functionality, Sales-Engineering Interface™, Simultaneous Translation, Soft Skills, Weblogs Tagged With: , , , ,