If you don’t know what the Engineering Career Success Summit is, it’s a conference focused on helping engineers transform into powerful leaders in their work and life. The two day event included fifteen different sessions covering business development, partnership/firm ownership, emotional intelligence, and lifestyle design topics. All of the content was designed for engineers and most of it was delivered by engineers.
Up front, this is an event that I’m responsible for developing, planning, and running. So I have a vested interest. Because I have a vested interest, however, I’m really interested in ensuring that each session is focused on a topic that will have real impact on an engineer’s career and life. I’ve attended a good number of events the past two decades and most of the information I received was fleeting or worse...not useful.
5 Take-Aways for A High Impact Engineering Career
Here are the 5 golden nuggets I left the 2015 Engineering Career Success Summit with:
1. There are a lot of really, really good books out there. If you don’t have a reading list and don’t think you have time to do it, you need to reconsider both. Each of us has 5 minutes in our day that we can set aside to read a book. Do that every day for a year and you have 30 hours a year invested in developing yourself for your career and life! Reading is the fast way to tap into other people’s brains to get the essential wisdom and knowledge that will help you grow professionally and personally.
Here’s a short list of books from the Summit to get you started:
- Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, Robin Sharma
- 4 Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss
- Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek
- Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon Sinek
- Good to Great, Jim Collins
- Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink
- The 5 Laws That Determine All of Life's Outcomes, Brett Harward (Brett was our keynote speaker at the 2014 Summit)
- Do Lead: Share your vision. Inspire others. Achieve the impossible., Les McKeown
- Win More Work: How to Write Winning A/E/C Proposals, Jim Rogers
- Who are you BECOMING?, Jonathan Fanning (Jonathan was our keynote speaker at this year’s Summit)
2. Communications is King. We talked a lot about communications during the Summit, no pun intended. A comment from one of panelists during the Project Management Communications panel was; “e-mail is a monologue and two monologues don’t make a dialog”. That’s so right. It was an obvious comment, but I hadn’t thought about email in that manner before. I think it captures the importance of picking our communications medium (i.e. email, phone, face-to-face) to match the purpose of the communications and the audience.
3. On Business Development. The four take-aways from the Business Development panel were:
- Integrity is key
- Take care of your clients
- Be confident and be yourself
- It’s about them…not you
A bonus on the topic of A/E work came from one of the panelists who’s been in the A/E/C industry for over 40 years: “find it, do it, bill it, collect it”. That was the 4-step work cycle for any engineering firm.
Every engineer is involved in business development either actively or passively. So you might as well learn what it’s about and how you can become more skilled at it.
4. What Do You Think? This question comes from Jonathan Fanning from his keynote opening talk at the Summit. It’s another communications tip aimed at opening up dialog between people in groups and between you as an engineer leader and your subordinates.
What it entails is you simply asking this question after stating a position.
As an engineer leader it’s easy to get in the mindset of giving direction and not thinking that you might be diminishing team member involvement. Throwing the question “what do you think?” at the end of your statement opens the floor up for other people to be involved and will earn buy-in a lot easier. You’ll also earn trust and loyalty.
5. Improvement and Action! One of the underlying themes of the 2015 Engineering Career Success Summit was “improvement”. Improving our ability to bring value to our firms, clients, and other people; as well as improving oneself professionally and personally. However, improvement only comes when it’s followed by action! We talked a lot about identifying individual improvement goals and then taking action immediately the week after the Summit.
The 2016 Engineering Career Summit is scheduled for May 12 - 14, 2016 in New Orleans. We’re already underway in planning for the event, building on the success of this past years Summit to provide engineers from all disciplines and career position, sessions that will enable them to engineer their own success.
If you haven’t already, check out The Engineering Career Coach podcast. In a recent episode Anthony Fasano, I, and one of the event attendees provide a breakdown of the lessons learned from the 2015 Engineering Career Success Summit.
Christian Knutson, P.E., PMP is an international infrastructure development program manager, engineer, and author. He has extensive experience in leadership, management, and engineering earned from a career as a civil engineering officer in the U.S. Air Force. He now coaches engineers enabling them to create an engineering career and life of fulfillment at The Engineering Career Coach.