How to maximize your career as an engineer

Tips on how you can get more out of your career

BY JEFFREY BAUSCH

Looking to land your first job? Want to advance your current position? Whatever the case may be, professional development can help increase your value as an engineer.

Here are a few ways how you can do this:

Go out and volunteer

Donate your time and help an outside organization. Whether it’s a technical or nontechnical group, you’ll acquire firsthand knowledge of business operations in an entirely different culture. Work your way up and you can gain valuable leadership experience, too. Both skills will give you a HUGE competitive edge on your resume.

If you’re already employed, then consider volunteering to work on an internal project that’s not directly assigned to you. Showing initiative will reflect well upon your professional character. It also shows the company that you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and do whatever it takes to help it succeed.

In either case, volunteering helps expand your network of professional contacts. Develop strong enough relationships and these could be people that you can call upon for recommendations down the road.

Also, consider this: people skills are often a differentiator for technical jobs. Sure, you might have the book smarts, but can you interact and effectively communicate your ideas to a team? By volunteering, you’ll learn how decisions are made in a group setting and how key members are able to influence one another.

If you’ve volunteered in the past, make sure to highlight the time you helped with training, supervising, development, etc. on your resume, even if it was done rarely or in an informal setting. A broad spectrum of volunteer experience shows that you can work with people from all different backgrounds.

Pursue extra training

If new opportunities don’t present themselves to you, seek them out for yourself by completing extra training and certification.

Look for ways to gain experience in areas outside of what your job asks of you. By doing this, you’re expanding your list of skills, which can help enhance your resume. Think about it – taking a leadership training course is likely to put you ahead of other candidates who might not otherwise possess a background in management.

Actively seeking out additional training when you already have a job can help solidify your position with the company as it makes you a more valuable employee to keep around. Be cautious, though, when you propose the idea to your director. You don’t want to come off as someone uninterested in their job. Instead, emphasize that you want the extra training so that you can use your new skills to help the company. Make it a point that your ultimate goals are teamwork and professional development.

Try to attend educational seminars on a regular basis, too. By staying on the cutting edge of new technologies, you are showing potential employers, or your current employer, that you are a progressive thinker and someone who can help take the company into the future.

Additional certification will help separate your resume from other job-seeking engineers who possess a similar set of skills. Make sure to highlight all seminars, workshops, and training that you’ve received under the “Education” section of your resume.

Publish, publish, publish

Employees who can write, make presentations, and get published are extremely valuable to a company. After all, it helps the business gain notoriety, and any publicity is good publicity.

If you are actively seeking a job, make sure recruiters are aware of any time that you were asked to write or make a presentation for a previous employer. Include clips of your work if possible.

Haven’t published anything yet? Now’s the time to get started.

Get yourself involved wherever and whenever possible. Be active in trying to publish journal articles. Working for patents looks good, too. Doing either not only helps expand your technical expertise, it looks great on your resume, too.

Furthermore, when you get published, you’ll also be putting your name out on the market. This could put you in touch with other leaders in the field and provide you with valuable networking opportunities. It also makes potential employers aware of your work which, obviously, doesn’t hurt either.

Remember:

All of these suggestions encompass one rule of thumb: experience matters. If you want companies to notice you, you need to go beyond the standard resume-attached-to-cover-letter e-mail, and instead show them that you are doing everything you can to be the best in your field. ■