My quest to become a well-rounded Engineer

TL;DR: Incrementally expand your skillset to become a future-proof Engineer  

Through the ages, Engineering has been a field that has sustained its growth by being highly specialized in a small set of skills. Entry into the field required years of training, practice, and apprenticeship. This increased the cost to enter the market; thereby maintaining the high caliber among the practitioners, high pay, and societal status. Anyone intrigued by these perks, would need to go through the initiation process associated with a particular subject (for example: Mechanical, Chemical, or Electrical Engineering). Once inside, the practitioners would apply the fundamentals to different problems and experiment solutions to build an answer. This way of excelling as an Engineer was profitable till recently. With increased knowledge parity, Globalization and the resulting job arbitrage, and the approaching Singularity, it has become imperative that the Engineer needs to re-invent and broaden their skillset into many subjects to sustain the growth that they had wished when they entered the field.

With this thinking, I had the chance to create a Skills Map to picture my talent spread on the topics I had the fortune to develop. 

The resulting expansive map is a product of the my opportunistic luck and the power of incremental change. Many a time advisors tell to work outside your comfort zone, but I’ve found the pragmatic way to push your comfort zone is by Incremental Exploration. It would be difficult for someone with Computer Science background to learn Business outright, but they can easily learn the economic impact of computer applications failing on the customer, thereby expanding the scope. Build upon this business acumen to learn the Management of Risk, then to Project Coordination of mitigation tasks. And so on to next. All incremental, compounding on the learning of the previous.

As you continue expanding by adding more branches to your skills map, the core strengthens and makes you an expert in the root subject. Added benefit is the exposure to concepts from other verticals allows you to translate ideas innovatively.

Hope this self-reflection exercise helps you. Happy expanding!

Check out the online version of my Skills Map at Mural App here.