Professional and Career Topics

​They say hindsight is 20/20. However, as engineers we try to be prepared for any technical scenario and are forced to deal with scenarios whether we are ready or not. The same thing goes with our careers and career paths. We try to go to the schools where we feel we will get the best education for our future careers and work for companies/agencies that will help progress our careers to where we want to go.

Looking back at your career from when you started, whether you started 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, or even greater than 35 years ago, is there anything you could have done differently to help prepare you for the career you have had so far?

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Kenneth Mika, PE M.ASCE

(920) 393-8484
kmika@...
Green Bay, WI
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Great topic Kenneth!  I started my career a little over 5 years ago, and college just a couple weeks over 9 years ago now (hard to believe how much time has flown).  I'm certainly keen to glean advice for my own career and offer some of my own experience to those just getting started.

In college:
I wish I had been more focused on learning topics rather than just being able to regurgitate them for a test.  To be sure, I learned a lot.  But there's been a number of times in my career where I've run into something, which I recognize, but have to go back and reteach myself.  Having see it before now combined with contextual experience for it certainly makes it MUCH easier to pick up. There's nothing wrong with a refresher, but if you make a point to genuinely learn these topics you'll save yourself time in the future.  As I've said elsewhere, getting an internship is great, but it's not the only thing.  Focus on getting any career experience you can even if it's just a job shadow.  Focus on building relationships.  Go to professor office hours, go to ASCE student chapter meetings, ask career professionals good questions.  Who you know really can be more important than what you know.

Early Career:
Be patient.  I struggled a lot with this starting out.  Coming from college where you learn dramatically different concepts hour to hour and change things up every few months (semester), work will likely not be the same.  You'll get into a lot of repetition as you learn new concepts.  Projects move slowly often times.  Instead of getting frustrated with the slower pace, use the extra time to immerse yourself in things.  You didn't have time to learn all the ins and outs of things like this in college.  Don't just know how to design something, learn why things are done a certain way.  Always be looking for that why.  You don't want to be a human computer just stamping a solution on a problem.  You need to learn to assess the situation and figure out the scenario.  No solution is perfect for every situation.  It takes time to learn all of these things.  I certainly still am, and a good engineer never stops, but in the beginning you don't even realize just how much you don't know.  College is over, learning has just begun.


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James Smith P.E., M.ASCE
Design Engineer
Grand Rapids MI
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A problem with hindsight is that it's biased: looking back from the vantage point of hindsight, we tend to think that things were more predictable at the time than they actually were.

A related problem is that we tend to not handle 'counterfactuals' well: we may miss how easily things could have turned out differently than we would predict from the vantage point of hindsight, due to the sometimes large effects of minor differences in circumstances, good and bad luck, etc. 

So I would argue that the 20/20 appearance of hindsight is somewhat illusory, and we need to be careful about trying to draw specific lessons from hindsight.  We can probably draw some general lessons from hindsight, but the same lessons may be more efficiently and effectively learned by looking at the collective experiences of our colleagues: what did they do and not do, and how did things work out for them?

I very much agree with James' point about trying to have a sense of how much we don't know.  This applies to engineers at all stages of their careers.  For younger engineers, the issue is largely a matter of not knowing things due to inexperience.  For more experienced engineers, the knowledge they do have can sometimes foster a degree of overconfidence, which can contribute to underestimating how much they don't know.  In my career of three decades so far, the best engineers I've known have all been humble, incisive, and always trying to learn more.

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Irfan A. Alvi, P.E., M.ASCE
President & Chief Engineer
Alvi Associates, Inc.
Towson, Maryland
www.alviassociates.com
ialvi@...
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Two big take-aways for me:

1. As an ROTC student at university, I didn't worry much about getting experience and internships while in school since I had my job already lined-up after graduation. At that time, I expected to make the Army my career. Five years after graduation, however, I had had enough of the Army and began looking for a civilian job in engineering. And boy did I wish I'd had some experience and internships on my resume! Take away: Never turn-down opportunities to gain experience.
2. Once I'd gotten into the civilian workforce, I was presented with many great opportunities, which I pursued. But I focused too much on how great the opportunity was and not enough on whether it was the right opportunity for me. This led to a career that was lucrative, but not necessarily fulfilling. Only when I had the courage to follow my desired career path did I find how rewarding my work could be.

I'm not coming into my 15th year as an engineer. Despite my "mistakes," I'd say I've had a pretty good run so far; one that has afforded me opportunities that have resulted in one of the most "unconventional" CVs I've ever encountered amongst my peers.

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Joel Dixon P.E., M.ASCE
Project Manager
Oklahoma City OK
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