Have you Learned your Lessons yet?

Featured Guest Blogger: Robert Mote

Motagg’s Blog by Robert Mote

Let’s connect on LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/robertmote

Every major project carries out an exercise to determine the Lessons Learned for future projects based on the design and execution of the present project.

When a project approaches maturation, project management decides to arrange a three-day Lesson Learned seminar across all disciplines. Some three weeks before the seminar, a spreadsheet is rushed out to all parties and engineers are sucking the pencils to come up with a lesson learned or hoping their colleagues will remember something useful. The engineer may be looking for a job, another project, thinking about holidays and, all too often, the activity of lessons learned is regarded a waste of time.  All the engineers and designers who could usefully contribute have long left the project anyway. It is even harder to remember the day-to-day issues of design work long past that would benefit a Lesson Learned. As most engineers do not follow their design through to completion, they cannot know the reality of design is so different to site practices.

Project management would consider it a success if ten to twenty items were captured for each discipline as Lessons Learned. Many engineers would also say that nobody reads the Lesson Learned of a previous project or follow them. I take a different viewpoint completely.

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Career Development Distractions and How to Overcome Them

Featured Guest Blogger: William Merunka
Follow me on my journey to become a great engineer.
Let’s connect on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/williammerunka

Career development is something that is never completed.  It is like an uncharted road trip with friends.  You start out with one objective, and when you think you have accomplished it and it’s time to go home, a new objective comes to life and the trip continues.   Along the road there will be good times and bad times, fun times and serious times, and relationships can be strengthened or broken on these adventures.  One thing for sure is that there will always be distractions.   Sometimes the distractions will be valuable and other times it will just have a negative impact on your objective.

A good distraction is one where you are taken off course, but in the end brought back on course, or even advanced further than you expected.  An example is going out to dinner with an old friend or colleague and being presented with an opportunity to move up within your company, or take a higher management position in another company.  An example of a bad distraction would be going out bar hopping with your friends and getting trashed the night before a big presentation or client meeting.  Today, I will talk about some ways to control some of the most common negative distractions that you are likely to be faced with on your road to success. Read more

A Declaration of Independence for Your Career!

July 4th is celebrated in the United States of America as a day of independence, in remembrance of that day in 1776 when the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence announcing that the thirteen American colonies then at war with Great Britain were now independent states, and thus no longer a part of the British Empire.  These colonies were free from the empire and were given the ability to make their own decisions.

This is how we should look at our careers.  Yes, you may work for a company or government agency, but you still have the right and responsibility to make your own career decisions.  Your company certainly may support you in your career but they are not going to tell you what direction or what path you should take, you must decide that.  If they do try to tell you what path to take, remember, you are not part of any empire, you are an independent professional. Read more

7 Steps for Building Successful LinkedIn Relationships

This is an article I wrote for Phil Richards blog about building relationships through LinkedIn.  I hope this is helpful to you in your career advancement efforts!

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Anthony Fasano, P.E., LEED AP, CPESC, CPSWQ, CPC

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Apathy, the Professional Disease

Featured Guest Blogger: Robert Mote

Motagg’s Blog by Robert Mote

Let’s connect on LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/robertmote

This can attack at any time in your professional life. It is a cultural disease and fairly contagious without treatment. Even if it is successfully treated it there is a chance of relapse. It is not just the peril of students life.

The symptoms are identifiable:

• Boredom

• Stressed

• Impatience

• Agreeing without checking Read more

Congrats on Engineering Your Way through College: Now Try Finding A Job!

The engineering curriculum at many colleges is among the most tedious and time consuming of all majors.  While students in other majors can spend a portion of junior year and most of senior year “enjoying” their college lives, engineers are often up late at night in the labs and libraries working on design projects and research papers.  Isn’t it a great feeling to finally get that engineering degree on graduation day?  The question then becomes, where do I go now?

Guest blogger William Merunka touched on some similar points in his inspirational article last week, however I have had so many inquiries from graduates about their current situations that I felt this topic warranted another post.

The bottom line is that the economy is still in rough shape and most engineering companies are still not hiring, but that doesn’t mean you should give up at all.  There is a great quote by an unknown person that goes, “When you want your goal badly enough, feel the intensity of it, let it fuel your waking thoughts and actions, let it influence you in all ways possible and let nothing get in the way of achieving it.”  I keep that quote taped to my monitor and refer to it regularly for inspiration and motivation, and it works very well. Read more

True Life: I’m a Civil Engineering Graduate, Now What?

Featured Guest Blogger: William Merunka

Follow me on my journey to become a great engineer.

Let’s connect on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/williammerunka

This time of the year is one that I hold very close to my heart.  Four years ago my name was called and I walked across the stage and grabbed that piece of paper that I and so many other people have worked so hard for.  That piece of paper was my College Diploma, and the feeling that filled me up when it touched my hand was incredible.  It was not the piece of paper that I was excited for, it was the end of a challenging journey, which was symbolized by the piece of paper.  I was ready to enter the real world and help solve the world’s problems while being an active member of the Civil Engineering industry.  While the past 4 years have not gone as I had imagined they would as I walked across that stage, I have learned a lot of valuable lessons and would not trade the experience in for anything.

If you asked me 4 years ago what I would be doing in 2010, I would have said “working towards my PE license and making a difference in the world.”  One of the major lessons I learned after graduation, is that things do not always go the way you envision them to go.  While this may be disappointing at first, when you look at the big picture, it’s not so bad.  Just because we may stray from the paved road, it does not mean we are a failure.  Each of us needs to go out there and create our own paths, some may be on mapped roads, and some may be in the open country. Read more

Engineers: How Well Rounded Are You?

Based on what I have seen in the engineering industry, it seems that well rounded engineers, advance much more rapidly than others.  This statement is not as obvious as it may sound when first reading it.  Wouldn’t you think that an engineer who is a design superstar that can crank out top notch design after top notch design would quickly climb the ranks?  Wouldn’t an engineer with profound managerial skills, ride those skills to the top?

It seems like what ends up happening is that the design superstar is so good at designing that they don’t end up doing anything else.  They design so efficiently and they enjoy it so much that they don’t really bother learning other skills and the company is enjoying their productivity so they go along with it.  The super manager can certainly manage people but when it comes time to get his or her hands dirty and jump into a technical situation to solve a problem, their weakness shows and it detracts from their overall managerial value. Read more

Engineers Do Great Things, Whether People Realize It or Not

This week I was a guest blogger for civilengineeringcentral.com.  Check out my post “Engineers Do Great Things, Whether People Realize It or Not.”

Click Here for Article!

Anthony Fasano, P.E., LEED AP, CPESC, CPSWQ, CPC

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The battle between Excel and MathCAD

Featured Guest Blogger: Robert Mote

Motagg’s Blog by Robert Mote

Let’s connect on LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/robertmote

One of the interesting habits I’ve seen along the way through my career is the abnormal attachment some structural engineers have for MathCAD. I understand some of the reasons, it may be something learned at university and the interest kept alive. It might be that it adds value intrinsically to the experience, the engineers enjoys using it because it is supported by many examples. The MathCAD software library is loaded with engineering examples so it seems a natural extension of oneself as an engineer.

As an engineer, I have used MathCAD in pursuit of research, calculating free-convective heat transfer properties or the Boussinesq Bulb of Pressure. I must admit I would never use it to calculate the theoretical wind load to be applied to a piperack in StaadPro. If truth be told, in a profession where the only mathematical excitement may be an occasional square root; as a practicing engineer, I haven’t yet found a power use for MathCAD. Read more