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O P I N I O N
Managing your career
T he junior engineer’s most important goal should be to balance the three aspects of their career: technical ability, social skills, and stewardship of the profession. Each aspect can be focused on like an individual skill. Neglecting one of these areas can result in a loss of opportunity. Prepare and execute a plan for balance and growth in the three biggest areas of your engineering career: technical ability, social skills, and stewardship of the profession.
greatly enhances the credibility of your argument. Once you’ve developed the ability to speak up, you need to learn when it’s best to stay quiet. This can only come from paying attention to your setting. Sometimes you’re just there to see how things are done, not to speak out of turn. Recognizing the expertise. You work in a fascinating and important field. You should feel privileged to tell people you’re an engineer. I do.” “You should also develop a curiosity for the profession beyond these three areas. Learn about the built world outside of your area of
Kyle Cheerangie
1)Technical ability. To increase your technical ability, review the standards, criteria, or design manuals of your discipline. Your knowledge base will quickly increase by doing this for one hour a day. Use your lunch break. Reviewing plans or reports that have already been completed by your managers is a great way of increasing your technical knowledge. This will give you insight into how design criteria are imple- mented into the final product. 2)Social skills. Out of college, many young profes- sionals have no real experience with interacting in a professional environment. It is essential to improve verbal communication. The best avenue for practic- ing this in a safe setting is a Toastmasters group. During a Toastmasters Table Topics session, you give an impromptu speech for up to two minutes. These short speeches teach you to slow down, clarify your thinking, enunciate your speech, and organize a line of reason. The effect bleeds over into daily conversa- tions. It’s more than removing “ums” and “ahs” from your language. Speaking with a clear line of thinking
See KYLE CHEERANGIE, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER June 24, 2019, ISSUE 1302
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