How to Get Noticed for the Right Reasons: Three Career Advancement Principles You Don’t Want to Forget

Featured Guest Blogger: John Morgan of Pounding the Pavement

John Morgan writes for the up-and-coming career blog, Pounding the Pavement. In his free time, Mr. Morgan also tackles topics related to online career training for Guide to Career Education.

Have you ever noticed that some people seem to be predisposed for success in the workplace? I’m not talking about business superstars—the superrich or super-successful giants like Warren Buffet or Steve Jobs—but the more down-to-earth successes that we see around us all the time. These are our colleagues and carpool companions who, though on the surface may seem no different from the rest of us, seem to have an uncanny ability to get recognized more quickly than others and to be offered opportunities for advancement that pass us by.

In our current competitive job market, it can be difficult to feel like we have what it takes to get ahead. Some people just seem to have that extra charisma that we wouldn’t know what to do with if it hit us in the back of the head. Nevertheless, there are certain, common-sense but easily forgotten principles that, when put into practice, stand out to employers and supervisors and can help pave the way to advancing your career.

Here are three time-tested principles for standing out at work: Read more

Important Things to Consider When Looking for that First Engineering Job

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 can be one of the most stressful times of an engineering student’s undergraduate college career.  Some of the things that you might be encountering in the upcoming months is: getting all of the paper work finalized for the April FE exam, studying to take FE exam in October, working on senior projects or thesis’s and making sure everything is lined up so that you can graduate on time in May.  Another stressful and important activity that undergraduates are doing is job searching.  With the current economy, it could be extra stressful as you don’t get the jobs that you want.

While getting a job for after college is important, you need to make sure that the job is right for you, and that you don’t take it just to say that you have a job.  Here is a list of things to consider when looking for that first job. Read more

Engineer your Future: An Interview with Stu Walesh

An Interview With: Stu Walesh, Ph.D., P.E., Dist. M. ASCE

Visit Stu’s website at helpingyouengineeryourfuture.com

Connect with Stu on LinkedIn

For this week’s blog post, it’s both an honor and a pleasure for me to interview Stu Walesh, Ph.D., P.E., Dist. M. ASCE.  Stu, practicing as an independent consultant, provides management, engineering, and education/training services to private, public, academic, and volunteer sector organizations.  After earning a BS in Civil Engineering at Valparaiso University, he obtained a MSE at The Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Stu is a licensed professional engineer in Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin and a Diplomate of the American Academy of Water Resources Engineers.

Stu has over 40 years of engineering, education, and management experience in the government, academic, and private sectors and has worked as a water resources engineer, project manager, department head, discipline manager, author, marketer, sole proprietor, professor, and dean of an engineering college.

I asked Stu the following questions in regards to career advancement for engineers:

Question: Stu, in your opinion, what are some of the biggest challenges for engineers in their career development? Read more

Engineers: Are We Too Technical to Manage?

Based on discussions with many engineers regarding their challenges in going from designer to manager, this week I wrote a guest blog article for civilengineeringcentral.com on this specific topic.  Read the full article. Read more

What Credentials Should I Get in My Career?

In speaking to many different professionals around the world, I often get the question, “What credentials should I obtain in my career advancement efforts?”  This is a very good question and it certainly requires some thought and estimation of how much impact certain credentials will have on your career.  I define credentials as licenses, certifications, degrees and any awards you may have won.

As far as licenses go, many professions have a major license in their industry that I strongly recommend they obtain.  For example, engineers – professional engineering license, accountants – certified public accountant, financial advisors – certified financial advisor, etc.   Beyond those mainstream licenses, we get into a myriad of degrees and certifications that aren’t so straightforward including masters degrees in your industry, MBA’s, PhD’s, certifications such as LEED AP for architects and engineers, green certifications for realtors and developers and so on and so forth.  Which ones should you get? Read more

Will Technology Ruin Your Career?

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

As time passes, new methods are developed and tasks that used to take up valuable time or would be tedious have become fast and simple.  One such item is the internet.  While it may have caught on slow, the internet is a necessity in almost everybody’s life.  Whether it is communicating with clients through email, research for a project, ordering gifts, or even ordering lunch for the office staff, we all use the internet.

While the internet is a useful tool, it has its flaws.  One of the bigger problems is that it does not come with a lie detector.  Whenever we have a question to answer and none of our friends or colleagues know the answer, or can convince us that their solution is correct, we Google it.  Instantly, we have multiple, sometimes hundreds of websites with information related to our research topic.  How do you use this information?  Do you trust it is 100% or do you do further research to validate it? Read more

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.

Read more

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!

Read full article.

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

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Join my Linkedin Engineering Career Development Group Read more