Chapter 43 - Long Term Career Growth in Engineering

(This is a sample chapter from "A New Mechanical Engineer's Handbook", due to be published later this year.)

Loads of folks go to high school with the end goal to get out of high school and go get a job. They often spend a lot of time afterwards wondering why they can’t get ahead. Trade folk and college folk have a leg up, they finish high school and make the next effort – get a degree or certification and follow a trade or a career. I will not focus on the trades, as much respect and admiration as I have for them. (It remains my opinion that Engineering is a trade with a college degree as a prerequisite.)

Long term goals for engineers are super broad. The CEOs of many companies are engineers, so are folk who startup new companies. Texas Instruments has a parallel growth path – one for technical growth and one for management growth. Many of our astronauts were engineers. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter were engineers who became president.

Getting a job as an engineer should just be a first step. Most companies with focus on success have a coaching program in place that will ask you what your goals are, both short term and long term. Usually – not always, but usually – companies that have this kind of plan also are willing to pay for your career growth. Take advantage of this!

Long Term Growth

Being an engineer is a great goal when you are young and looking for a career path, but it should not be the end! That would mean total lifetime success is complete at twenty-something. Getting started in your professional career is a huge success, no sneer intended, but once on the career path the next steps are just as important.

The ability to plan long term is totally a function of how confident you are in the future. Ideally you should have a long-term goal (GOAL means the direction you are heading, where you are trying to GO) and set out some objectives in that direction (OBJECTIVE means the intermediate step or OBJECT in the direction of the GOAL). It’s okay to change your Goal over the length of your career. Your Goal should be the ultimate end game. Here are some examples of Goals…

-         Retirement by age 50*

-         Director level position in Johnson and Johnson

-         Ten patents in packaging technology

-         Any role directly contributing to NASA (this was mine)

-         Founding a startup manufacturing center

-         Building a professional network that spans USA, Europe and China

-         Contribute as a professional engineer in Germany (or pick your country)

The main thing your goal should provide is guidance for your objectives. In order to get a role with NASA, after you just got hired by Coca-cola bottling, might not seem obvious. It’s okay (and often encouraged) to share your long term goal with your current company when they ask about coaching. Your employer wants to get everything they can from you and your grey matter, so they will likely be happy to cover expenses to study statistical anomalies in manufacturing, or composite materials, or system controls. They get the benefit of your education, you get the credentials.

Long term growth is a step by step process, though. Sort of like finding your way through the wild west; you need to know where you’re trying to get to as well as the immediate obstacle. Knowing one without the other means you’re spinning like a top or sitting like a toad. That means once the compass setting has been nailed down (for now) the immediate task is to move that rock. Or climb that hill. Choose your metaphor.

Short Term Objectives

The secret to long term success is Cadence. Cadence is a rhythm, and when it comes to career growth a strong but manageable cadence is important. Not so frequent that it burns you out, not so sporadic that you forget about it. Somewhere between one objective a year and one objective a quarter, although I would not be able to maintain one a quarter for more than two or three years. And it’s okay to have an objective break down into smaller chunks of objective – getting a PMP certification takes some time, but attending the seminars that are required are reasonable chunks that aggregate up to a big objective.

Some short term objectives your employer might be happy to help with are…

-         Get you Six Sigma Green Belt (or black Belt)

-         PE Certification.

-         Be a contributing member to an ASME board. Any board.

-         Get your Program Management Professional certification (PMP)

-         Attend the Association for Manufacturing Excellence annual conference.

-         Attend a seminar on a particular subject matter related to both your goal and your employer’s business.

-         Author a white paper on a technology related to your goal.

-         Make a presentation to the organization of your choice about a technology or change related to your goal.

-         Get an article published in a trade magazine. Collect these where you can.

-         Offer to teach a seminar for free at the local junior college.

-         Create a networking meeting related to your goal. Do it two or four times a year.

The key is consistency. Find that cadence that works for you and follow it. Getting a college degree took the same motivation, it was just more concentrated and already structured for you. Now you have to build the structure. Imagine what the credentials would be for your long term Goal and build a curriculum to meet that list. Some things might be training and certification, some might be experience, some might be publication, some might be projects. It’s your plan and there are no templates to follow.

So returning to my assertion that Engineering is a trade with college as a prerequisite. Let’s assume that’s true. Most trades follow this approach –

Apprentice – Learning from a skilled employer, often at low wages;

Journeyman – Successful completion of Journeyman program, can now operate independently;

Master – a Journeyman who has several years of experience plus passing a Master exam of some kind.

If you consider this as true and reasonable (especially that nobody gets to be a master straight out of college), then you can adapt this to your own career. It’s easy because nobody else is doing it. Make your own rules.

Apprentice. This is what I refer to as Engineer I, usually straight out of school or in the first three to five years of work in the industry. You have a job, maybe your second. It takes a few months until you feel really comfortable making more of the same thing they already make, you know the document control system. You might be wondering why you can’t be a Journeyman today? The obvious answer is that you only know the one or two companies you have ever seen. You need exposure. Unless your career plan is to remain within the company for the length of your career, an admirable goal but really only applicable in Japan or some shops in Germany. So, unless you want to start jumping companies (NOT recommended BTW) you need to find ways to expand.

This is where the short term objectives come into play. Find an opportunity to expand – maybe finding an engineer in another industry and writing a white paper on what they do as co-authors. Take a class in Lean Solutions.

It will be hard to jump from Apprentice to Journeyman without changing companies. If you are lucky enough to be in a large company, like Boeing, or Lockheed Martin, or Toyota, or General Electric, or Honeywell, you will have the ability to see other ways of doing things and getting access to new challenges, but these are the exceptions. If you spend your three to five years in a low volume high mix environment you have no idea what mass production challenges exist. If you have been focused on making four thousand units an hour minimum you have no idea of the hurdles around DFM for a single massive machine that will never be reproduced but has to go to production in six weeks. And weirdest but most significant, if you spend all your time in a company that has their act together you will never see the challenges a struggling company suffers.

It's not fair to say you can’t be a journeyman within a single industry or company, but it is also not fair to say a journeyman in a single skillset is the same as a journeyman in multiple industries. Look at your Goal. Which one do you need?

Journeyman. You’ve been in the mix for three to five years now, essentially a college level education in actual practice. If you have been the passive inactive engineer waiting for someone to assign them a task and keeping a low profile, odds are good you are not Journeyman grade yet – it doesn’t come from steeping in the building or osmosis. You need to stretch and learn. When you and those around you feel you are demonstrating the kind of experience and competence that garners a project on your own, you are Journeyman class. My usual reference for this role is Engineer II (or Engineer III if HR is forcing me to employ more than 3 classes) and it is a combination of time and exposure as well as developing credentials in knowledge and practice. A Journeyman or Engineer II is expected to be able to operate solo on significant projects. That engineer is expected to know when they are out of their depth and have the confidence to reach out to others when they need support. They are NOT expected to be the smartest person in the room – in fact attempting to be the smartest person in the room is often an indicator that they are not Journeyman class ready.

Sometimes, not always, the obvious transition to Journeyman class or Engineer II is changing roles or companies. In a broad company like Honeywell, moving from Process engineering to Design engineering, or vice versa, is the company showing confidence in your skills and helping you grow.

In my jaded eyes an Engineer II is not a leading role. I don’t expect Engineer II to train Engineer I. That is the role of Engineer III (or Engineer V if I really have to).

Master. This is the Engineer III role and usually takes ten years or more to earn. This person is expected to take a new engineer under wing and be the mentor. Not permanently of course, but for the first year or so. An Engineer III should have the patience and self confidence and competence to help the new engineer build momentum. Once again, this individual is NOT expected to be the smartest person in the room – that stumbling block must be long behind them.

The Engineer III role is important to both the company and the team. You can have an engineering team chock full of smart, but there needs to be some chain of competence and authority, especially when it comes to review and approvals. It’s not a title like “King”, it’s a responsibility like “Dad”, because when things go well the praise goes to the Engineer I or II, and when things go wrong the person held accountable is Engineer III.

All of this is my opinion, of course, and if you are working with or for me this will help you understand why I do what I do.

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*Retirement at age 50 is a rare thing for an engineer. Retirement at 70 is almost as rare. The average lifespan of an engineer after retirement is 6 months. This is not because we are unhealthy, it’s because we don’t want to stop.

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David West is a mechanical engineer with over twenty years in engineering management and building teams. He has consulted with, or worked for, companies in Production Manufacturing, Pharma, High Tech and Med Device.