You're a civil engineer.  Guess what, there's tens of thousands of them in the U.S. alone. You're a project manager.  Well, there are more than 390,000 of them in the world based simply off those registered as Project Management Professionals. 

If you are relying on your education or certificate-based label to define how you generate value in the workplace, then you are selling yourself short.  There ismore to your value generating than simply what degree you hold or letters you earned behind your name. 

Your ability to generate value is directly related to the qualities that you, and you alone posses that when mixed together make you unique. 

When I started off in my professional career I consciously threw a firewall between my "life" and my "work".  I didn't think for one moment that my creative skills of improvisation developed playing saxophone in jazz and rock bands had any bleed over into my nascent engineering career. 

It was the same with my fitness or diet regimens or my opportunities to travel around the world for work and vacation. These were simply things I did in life, so there was no way they could have an effect on the value I generated in my professional work.

I was wrong.

My improv skills on the horn parlayed into my ability to stand in front of audiences of 1 to 100 and deliver a presentation and to be creative on my feet, playing to the audience when necessary.  My travel experiences gave me a wider perspective of the world, one informed that culture and geography aside, people are people anywhere on our interconnected world.  My fitness and diet were the foundation and fuel that gave me stamina and allowed me to keep driving when others had given up and to stay mentally in the game when others had checked out. 

These seemingly unrelated elements of my life actually were the catalysts that allowed me to generate the value I provided in my work. The bad news for me was that I didn't fully understand this until twelve years into my professional career.  The good news is that I figured it out.

So what good news do you have for your self about the qualities that you bring to work that generates value?  For certain, knowing how your business operates is important: how to generate leads, how to make a pitch, how to close, or how to deliver.   Those are techniques that you developed because of the other qualities that you posses that define you from every other engineer. 

Reflecting on these elements from your life will definitely help you generate value in your work.  Once you know what they are, you can play to these strengths in the jobs you seek or the projects you take on board.

How you define what your life-side value generators ,is a process that can take minutes for some and years for others.  Once I figured out that there is not supposed to be a firewall between life and work, that they are integral to each other, I spent a lot of time analyzing what I did that was (a) enjoyable to me and created value, and was (b) effortless and also created value. 

(Note: value here is more than just the bottom financial line.  It also refers to non-financial value like experience, knowledge, relationships, etc.) 

The items I mention above kept showing up on lists and in my writing, as did many other items that didn't have direct ties into my work.  Curious enough, items like "reading spreadsheets" or "sitting in meetings" didn't make the list.  But items like "mitigating risks" and "developing relationships and connections" did.  They're connected, but not the same.  The former are techniques, the later are encompassing traits.  As part of mitigating risks, I may have to read spreadsheets and in situations where this is the case, I don't mind sifting through the rows and columns.

Value generation in the world today will not come simply from the label you pick up from college or your current position.  It will only come from the unique skills, beliefs, experiences and the special mix of all of them that defines what you do, who you are.  You can be an engineer, a project manager, and etcetera and generate value by not knowing what the deeper meaning is behind how you do what you do. 

But why would you?  Knowing how you generate value is a lot more fun.

“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.” Albert Einstein

Christian Knutson, P.E., PMP is an international infrastructure development program manager, engineer, and author. He has 21 years of experience in leadership, management, engineering and international relations earned from a career in the U.S. Air Force and is author of The Engineer Leader, a recognized blog on leadership and life success for engineers and professionals.

Image courtesy of Anusorn P nachol at FreeDigitalPhotos.net