April 2014

IN FOCUS: CAREER DEVELOPMENT
The Engineer’s Career Plan

Drawing up a career plan is easy. Drawing up and following a career plan of real value takes time and effort.

BY MATTHEW McLAUGHLIN

Early on in his career as a civil engineer designing residential and commercial developments, Anthony Fasano, P.E., decided he wanted to become an associate partner at the engineering firm where he worked. At age 27 he became the youngest associate partner in Maser Consulting’s history.

“I wanted to become an associate; that’s the level I wanted to get to, and so I put a lot of effort into developing my skills and taking all of the steps I needed to take to achieve that goal,” says Fasano, who has since moved on to found the Institute for Engineering Career Development, author the book Engineer Your Own Success, and become executive director of the New York State Society of Professional Engineers.

It might seem as though there was something special about the skills Fasano developed or the steps he took, but there was not, at least, no more so than the steps you take to work every day. Fasano simply created a map to guide his steps and get where he wanted to go; first, he picked a destination, and then he asked for directions.

“Basically, what I decided was that, if I want to be successful as an engineer, the best thing for me to do is to interview and talk to successful engineers,” he says. “In doing that I realized all of the engineers in my field that were successful had something in common—they all had very good professional skills, communications skills, [and] leadership abilities.”

What Fasano did to become an associate partner at his engineering firm are things he now recommends as an engineering career coach. They are also an important part of creating any career or professional development plan.

Thanks to the Internet, the number of resources for creating career plans is incalculable, but in all of them there are similarities, common parts to any solid career plan. First among them are identifying a target job, figuring out where one wants their career to go, and identifying the skills and knowledge needed for the position, as well recognizing in one’s self what necessary skills and knowledge are missing.

After determining where one wants their career to go and the skills and knowledge they need to get there, the next part of creating a career plan is forming the plan itself, setting specific goals aimed at filling any skill gaps. Finally, the last and perhaps most important part of any career plan is the knowledge that there is no last part to any career plan.

A career plan cannot be written in stone. What someone wants out of a career can change, what employers want out of their employees in a particular position can change, and those competing for the same career goals can easily pass someone who stops trying to improve.

“For most engineers, what happens is they get so involved in their projects that they’re working on, they never think about their own career development and their own career planning,” Fasano says. “They just think about the next deadline that they see in front of them, and that causes a lot of engineers to get disengaged in their careers.”

Career plans can help engineers stay focused on their own career development and reach the places they want to go in their careers. “Having a plan and being serious about goals, with an understanding of what goals are important at certain points in your career, helps get it done,” says Gary Hinkle, principal management consultant and founder of engineering leadership and communication consulting firm Auxilium. “But not having a plan, it’s not likely to happen.”

“You have to have goals,” adds John Hoschette, founder of engineering career consulting firm Career Development Coaches and author of The Engineer’s Career Guide and Career Advancement and Survival for Engineers. Hoschette compares career planning to the long-term strategic planning done by large companies: “You as an engineer need that same thing.”

Where To?
The first part in creating any career plan is figuring out the job one wants to have. This may seem like the easiest part of creating a plan, it may even be the easiest part, but it can also be the trickiest.

It’s not that people are unable to make good decisions about what to do in their careers. It’s that people sometimes don’t have all the information when they make those decisions.

“I think the key thing that most engineers forget to think about is why they want to reach a certain level in their career,” Fasano says. It’s easy for someone to decide where they want to be in 10 years without actually stopping to think about why they want to be there or examining the details of what it would be like, but some engineering disciplines are even more likely to fall into this trap because of commonly held expectations for what an engineering career in those disciplines should look like. “If you don’t think about that question, you could be chasing after a goal for a long time just because it’s the traditional route. That’s why, when I do a lot of coaching of engineers, we work on that question quite a bit.”

Once engineers recognize they need to more seriously consider the aim of their career, regardless of whether they’re already in a position they don’t like, chasing a position they don’t know they will like, or just graduating college, the question becomes how to make an informed decision. The answer is to get to know themselves and get to know people with the job they are interested in.

Two exercises Fasano often does with engineers are to have them write down the things they like doing at work or would enjoy doing given the opportunity and to write down why they are interested in a certain job. It sounds simple, but he has seen people discover they would prefer something different from what they had been thinking of pursuing.

Networking with engineers who already hold a position someone is interested in is the best way for that person to know what they’re getting into. Conveniently, as Fasano’s story demonstrates, it’s also the best way to determine the skills and knowledge needed for a particular job.

Mind the Gaps
Once a decision has been made on the destination, the next part of creating a career plan is figuring out the skills and knowledge one needs to acquire in order to reach it. This is a two-part process that involves identifying the skills and knowledge the job demands and identifying the skills and knowledge one lacks or may be weak in.

The most common refrain from career consultants when offering advice on how engineers can figure out the gaps between the skills and knowledge they have and the skills and knowledge they need for a particular job is to seek outside help and input. That help could come from mentors, professional societies, coworkers, or career consultants.

Talking to successful engineers, as Fasano did, is a good way to learn about the skills a job demands. “You need to try to find people that are successful in your specific field and then learn from them,” says Fasano. “If you’re a structural engineer that designs steel bridges, you should try to find a structural engineer who designs steel bridges.”

Identifying the skills and knowledge necessary to get and perform the duties of a particular job is really the easy part though. The hard part is diagnosing the skills and knowledge one lacks or may be weak in.

“The mechanics of putting together a [career] plan are really easy,” Hinkle says. “People can go find some sort of format for what a good plan looks like, but the content of it starts with that self awareness aspect, and that’s really the hard part. Without that, everything else doesn’t matter too much.”

“You have to do an honest assessment of your skill-set,” Hoschette says. “What I do is ask people to talk to the people that they work with, and that’s usually a real eye-opener.”

Hoschette recommends engineers ask their mentors, boss, and coworkers what they are good at and in what areas they could improve. “It’s painful to do sometimes,” he says. “People have their vision of themselves and then there’s this vision that other people see, and oftentimes they’re very different.”

Set Goals and Repeat
The final two parts of creating a career plan are setting goals aimed at filling any skill and knowledge gaps and then continually reevaluating and updating your career plan.

“That’s where most engineers fail,” warns Fasano. “Even if they get through the goal-setting process, then they, again, get so looped into the projects, and the deadlines, and everything else going on that they don’t check back in and they just lose it.”

The tendency for engineers to become distracted by their work is one reason why Fasano and others have become involved with career consulting for engineers. “Only the most either brilliant or self-motivated engineers don’t need a lot of help,” Hinkle says. “As intelligent as pretty much all engineers are, their profession is so complex that figuring it out on their own is really not the best thing for most people.”

If a career consultant or coach isn’t an option, setting clear and achievable goals can also help keep engineers on track with their career plan. Fasano recommends the SMART method for goal setting, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals (see previous page).

At the end of the day though, it’s up to the individual engineer to take responsibility for his or her own career. “It’s kind of like running a marathon, career planning,” Hoschette says. “There are going to be times when you get very frustrated, and what’s going to carry you through that frustration level is a passion for what you do and motivation, internal self-motivation. You aren’t going to find the magic answer out there by reading a book, or talking to one person, or something like that. What it is, is you got to look inward also, and you have to be resilient.”