All around us, we see numerous brilliant feats of engineering. Million things are yet to be dreamed and engineered.
Engineering is a broad discipline with several fields and lots of career pathways, which turn you into a successful engineer. You can direct your career in any direction.
Following are some tips to become a successful engineer:
Defining goals
For successful engineering projects and careers, you have to define your medium and long-term goals. This helps to keep you focused and drives you in the forward direction. It is also imperative to review your progress while achieving your goals, regularly.
Commitment to Continuous Professional Development
You must engage in continuous professional development in order to keep up in a rapidly changing world thus enhancing your value to the employers. You must be constantly looking for new professional development opportunities and at the same time, you should also enthusiastically acquire new skills.
Improve your Problem-solving skills
Problem-solving is an essential skill required in every field of engineering. This skill needs to be continuously improved and must be developed at each stage of the career. Choose meaningful problems, challenges that you are passionate about, solving which will result in a better world for all. The desire to fix something broken is an entrepreneurial spark.
Build or join an Outstanding Team
In your team, there should be people who complement your talents, who will challenge you to exploit your full potential. There is a saying, ‘ There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.’ You must aim to help build teams that work well enough together, forgetting what idea was given by whom.
Improve your Soft Skills
In addition to technical skills, it is equally important to develop soft skills such as organization, teamwork, and presentation skills. Take time to acquire and improve these skills.
Two more skills are very important. Develop communication skills because you will need to communicate with others at various levels like peers on your team, junior engineers, your seniors, clients, engineers who work for your company’s customers and more.
Having great collaboration skills is also important. When all team members work together, there is a fast solution to problems, there are effective solutions, and good quality is maintained.
Focus on the details
Attend to details meticulously because details matter in engineering, in every task and every project.
Learn from mistakes
Failures and mistakes are common things in engineering and can be considered as part of the process, especially when you are working with cutting edge technologies, processes, or systems. Utilize these situations as opportunities to learn, develop, and improve.
Understand Business
The people who make decisions about the projects you work on, decide from a business perspective, due to which, they want a return on investment, and they would not be much interested in the innovative approach of problem-solving you employ. Knowing a little business helps, especially if you understand what makes decision makers tick. This can prove to be helpful when you have to work with different business teams – teams outside engineering. This way, you will have knowledge about the different requirements and perspectives of business.
Adopt Change
You should always be flexible, ready to change. You must be able to embrace the rapid advancements in technologies and thinking, particularly if you’re involved in software engineering, automation engineering, and similar fields. Be ready to change the way you do things. Learn to identify opportunities in uncertainty.
Trust your Instincts
Follow your gut. You will have to make decisions from incomplete information. Utilize your intelligence to chalk out the pros and cons. You can talk to your friends regarding this but ultimately trust your instincts.
Work Hard
“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration”. So, anything is possible with hard work. It is a challenge to build simple, reliable solutions to complicated problems. Complex or fragile products are not commercially viable, and are not adopted by the masses.
Tell your story well
For a breakthrough, you need to deeply understand user pain and aspirations. If a new product does not have sufficient value to attract end-user attention, it will be a failure.
Be Optimistic
Always have an optimistic attitude, because engineering involves problem-solving. So, be hopeful while solving challenges. Cultivate an undying infectious optimism as it is essential to lead people or an industry.
Be Realistic
Balancing optimism with reality is critical. Stay focused on the long-term vision while remaining grounded in what you have to fix right now.
Identify Role Models and Mentors
Role models and mentors can help you further develop your career. It can be a formal relationship or it can be an informal one too, where you can simply talk, ask questions, work on teams or projects they are also involved with. Role models can be from within the company like, the best engineer in your company, or can be from outside your company, including industry leaders. Get inspired not only by their work, but also by their road to success.
Flexibility
As engineering is a broad field, it offers lots of opportunities. Goals must be defined, but implemented with flexibility. In 10 years, you could be in a role which does not even exist today. Some industries, that you might never have considered, may offer you significant opportunities.
Work-life Balance
In order to be a successful engineer, it is important to strike the right overall work-life balance. Make time for family, friends, and hobbies. Find a way to rejuvenate, when you find yourself feeling burned out.
Follow these tips and change the world, applying science, maths, and logic.
