Engineering Your Transformation: 13 Unconventional Practices to Broaden Your Horizons and Sharpen Your Skills

Want to sharpen your engineering skills? Here are 13 unconventional exercises to push you out of your comfort zone and into growth.

Exercise 1: Future Forecasting

Try to predict the future trends of your field in the next 10 years and outline what skills you will need to meet those changes.

Exercise 2: Tech to Tangible

Identify a complex technical concept and explain it in layman's terms to a non-engineer. Doing this can improve your communication skills and help business stakeholders appreciate the value and impact of your work.

Exercise 3: The E.T. Exercise

How would you explain your job to an extraterrestrial? Doing this helps you distill your work to its essence and see it from an entirely fresh perspective.

Exercise 4: Retro Rebuild

Pick a modern piece of technology and imagine how you would have built a version of it using only the technology that was available 50 years ago.

Exercise 5: Hackathon at Home

Set aside a weekend for your own personal hackathon. The challenge? Creating a functioning prototype of an idea you've had.

Exercise 6: The Invention Journal

Keep a running list of daily problems for which you could engineer solutions. Noting these encourages constant creativity and problem-solving.

Exercise 7: Bridge Building

Attempt to explain a project you're working on to someone from a different field. The goal here is to cultivate interdisciplinary thinking and communication skills.

Exercise 8: Fictional Engineering

Choose a technology or device from a sci-fi movie or book and outline how you would go about making it a reality.

Exercise 9: Failures to Successes

Think about a project that didn't succeed. Write down what you learned from it and how those lessons have applied (or could apply) to your current projects.

Exercise 10: Emulate the Greats

Pick a successful engineer in your field, research their career path and achievements, and identify actions you can take to emulate their success.

Exercise 11: Green Engineering

Think about how you could make a current project more environmentally friendly or sustainable. What would need to change? What challenges would you need to overcome?

Exercise 12: Design for Accessibility

Review a product or structure in your area of expertise, and redesign it with accessibility in mind. This can help you think about design from different user perspectives.

Exercise 13: Elevator Pitch

You find yourself in an elevator with Elon Musk. You have one minute to pitch your most innovative engineering idea. What do you say?

Have a creative practice you'd like to share? Drop it in the comments.