Professional and Career Topics

For a lot of us, figuring out what’s next in our careers isn’t always straightforward.

Managers – how do you help your engineers get clear on their career goals and what path fits them best?

Engineers / Individual contributors – how do you decide if you want to stay technical or move into leadership?
And if leadership is the goal, what skills do you know you’ll need to get there?

I’m curious to hear how y’all are thinking about this because the way we grow and retain great engineers depends on it.

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Michele Heyward EIT, M.ASCE
Denmark SC
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This is a challenging one for me.

My managers have done a great job of letting me take on tasks that interest me and fall within my skill set. Some of us in leadership have tried to help our technical staff see that going into project management isn't the only option ahead of them since we also need technical experts with experience. When the company was much smaller, most of the engineers ended up in project management through necessity of keeping up with the workloads. 

I'm in a bit of a career limbo where I've been tasked with some new/expanded responsibilities that don't fall within our traditional career path options. I enjoy the work I've been assigned, but that also means there is no one ahead of me who I can look to for what my career trajectory can/will look like. It's one of the growing pains as the company expands and needs additional roles that they don't have a great way to categorize/manage yet.

One thing I greatly appreciated was around the time I was promoted into leadership, they had an external consultant come in to give series of interactive leadership seminars that were really beneficial. He has been a consultant for our strategic planning for years, so he is very familiar with the company and was able to tailor the training to us.

Part of what I've been tasked with in my unnamed role is helping direct a new, more formalized internal training framework. I would love as it grows for it to include professional training for different career tracks to help people develop skills before they are moved into a new role.

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Heidi C. Wallace, P.E., M.ASCE
Tulsa, OK
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