How to achieve your long-term career goals

Career tips to help electrical engineers figure out how to get to where they want to be

BY JEFFREY BAUSCH

The ability to set and achieve goals is essential to achieving a long and successful career as an electrical engineer. A lack of focus, foresight, and proper planning will almost always deter one’s professional trajectory.

Establishing a clear career path is crucial to accomplishing one’s long-term professional goals as an electrical engineer. (Credit: stevescottsite.com.)

But how can today’s EE go about determining where he/she wants to be 5…10…20 years down the road? Believe it or not, the process is actually quite simple. Here are some steps that can help you take your career to where you want it to be.

Begin thinking about milestones that you want to achieve in your career.

Some might be unique to your particular job situation, but if you’re at a loss on where to start, there are plenty of universal options to choose from:

• Grow in your current position.

• Move up with your current company.

• Continue to learn/attain additional degrees.

• Assume additional responsibilities.

• Earn a higher salary.

Write these goals down in the natural order you expect to achieve them and you will begin to notice that some can actually be combined (e.g., growing in your current position/moving up with your current company/earning a higher salary: one leads into the other into the other). It’s at this point where you can begin to figure out additional skills that might be beneficial in moving your career forward. This brings us to the next step:

Identify the skills you will need in order to achieve your long-term goals.

Do you need more education? Do you need to establish experience in a particular industry niche? These kinds of questions are important to consider when forming your long-term goals.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you envision yourself eventually owning a company (I’m going really broad with this example.) If that’s the case, then you’ll likely need knowledge on how to write a business plan. You’ll also need, at the very least, a basic understanding on how to handle finances. You should know how to manage employees and have some marketing skills, too. These are all areas of expertise that average electrical engineers do not typically have, but are crucial to being successful in this endeavor.

Here’s another example: You want to publish articles, studies, and the like. Well, how are your writing skills? Be brutally honest here. While you’re at it, consider your proofreading and editing skills, too. Do you need to begin writing more? Perhaps you might want to consider taking some local writing classes to really get yourself going.

If you’re serious about laying out your long-term goals, then it’s absolutely imperative that you first take the time to recognize areas where professional growth is needed. And you do this by identifying the areas where you are already sufficiently qualified. This brings us to the next step:

Identify your current skills.

These are the skills that you can use to build your career upon; your foundation, if you will. Start out by asking yourself: How far along are you today? Again, be truthful in your self-assessment and identify your strengths, abilities, experience, etc. Include volunteer work, hobbies, seminars that you’ve attended anything that you feel has helped you become the engineer that you are today. The more honest you are with yourself, the easier it is to see the areas where you can grow more.

Determine how to get from where you are to where you want to be.

Now that you have your current list of skills as well as the skills you need in order to get ahead in your career, you can begin to map out the most efficient ways to get from point A to point B. If you’re looking for a job, consider entry-level work for companies that have positions within that you aspire to one day hold. Consider the gap between the two and what, exactly, you need to do in order to eventually attain one of those positions. In some cases, it might be as simple as number of hours worked,but more often than not, it’s much more involved. Regardless, when considering the responsibilities of your newly acquired job, it’s important that you also have the foresight to consider everything else you need to do in order to take your career further.

If you are currently employed and looking to grow your career, you might want to consider taking classes or attending seminars in order to broaden your abilities and deepen your knowledge of a specialty. You can also volunteer to work on extra assignments outside your expertise to help you better understand an area of engineering that you want to eventually get involved in. Sure, it’s extra effort on your end, but if it’s properly planned out, it’s an investment of your time that will pay off in the long run.

Need help getting focused?

Start out by setting short-term goals in order to get yourself going. Right now your goal may be to get a (new) job, so consider the ideal kind of job you want and identify the skills you have to have in order to get this job. Then begin to connect the dots to figure out how you can successfully land the gig.

Once you have the job and have established some stability in your career, you can then begin to plan out some longer-term goals for yourself. Start short with maybe a “one-year from now I want to be doing . . .” sort of scenario. Once that’s mapped out and you begin to take your career down this particular path, you can then forecast a bit further by looking a few years down the road. Before you know it, you’ll have a series of long-term goals and clear, actionable tasks that you can work toward in order to get your career to where you want it to be. ■