You're listening to the Engineer to Leader Podcast, episode number one. Today we're talking all about two topics actually. First I'll give you an idea about what this podcast series is all about and what you can expect from it, and second I'll explain why you can't expect your engineering, scientific, or technical career to develop as you might expect. It just won't be a straight line, so stay tuned.
Hi, I'm Steven Cerri, and I'm here to help you advance your engineering, scientific, and technical career by avoiding the mistakes and the missteps that can slow down or even derail your promising career. I'm the first to say that mentors, coaches, and the right advice can make all the difference in your career success and your career speed of advancement as long as you couple it with the right mindset. How do you find the right mentor, the right information, the right advice, and the right mindset to put all of this together and build the career that you want? This is the Engineer to Leader Podcast.
Hello, this is Steven Cerri. Thank you for joining me on this podcast. I'd like to begin this podcast by telling you a little bit about who I am, and why I developed this podcast series. By way of education, I have a bachelor of science in aeronautical engineering, a master's in geophysics, and an MBA. Throughout my career, I've been involved primarily in technical organizations, and those technical organizations have been in government, department of defense and contractor work in commercial environments with a printer company, and in large corporations as well as a couple of startups. I've seen the insides and the processes of both government and civilian organizations, as well as large organizations and small startups.
The kind of work that I've done inside these organizations has ranged from being an engineer to being a project manager, to being a director of engineering, to being a vice president of engineering, to being a systems engineer and working on large-scale satellites and on the shuttle. I've worked in printer companies as a product development manager, and as a chief training officer. Throughout my career, I've been involved in a variety of different technical disciplines. Always around engineering, science, and technology, and all the way from being an engineer to ultimately being a general manager. And from being a systems engineer to being a vice president of engineering, as well as being a commercial printer product manager.
My perspective comes from a variety of different places and different ideas about how to be successful in different environments. I've also been training in organizations for about 14 years. I actually go out to organizations, go to their sites, and train engineers and scientists and technologists in providing two-day classes in communications, interpersonal communications, management, leadership, negotiations. A variety of topics all around how to provide engineers and scientists and technologists with the information that we don't usually get in school. Schools teach us how to be really great technical people. We know how to solve technical problems, but we don't often learn how to be part of a team while we're going to school. The assumption is that once we get into a work environment, we'll figure out how to be part of a team. We'll figure out how to provide our ideas in a way that contributes to the overall success of the team, but in reality that's not how it works.
It's very difficult to learn effectively how to be part of a team. How to contribute your ideas, how to grow your career. These are all things that we expect to learn, and our organizations expect us to learn on the fly, but it's not very simple. It's not very straightforward. I put together this series of podcasts, and I can tell you this series is going to go for about a year. If not, much, much longer. We'll see how long it proceeds, but I've already got something like 50 podcasts lined up. Different topics that I know will have a positive impact on your ability to build your technical career. That's what this series of podcasts is all about. How do you build a engineering, scientific, technical career? That allows you to have the career you want, have the impact that you want, have the long term success that you want, and provides you with the life that you want to have?
I'm going to be giving you in these podcasts, not only information that comes from experience about what to do and how to do it, but also how to think about your career. How to think about the organization that you're in, how to think about how to move forward and be successful long term. One point that I want to make sure that emphasize, and that is everything that I'm going to be teaching you, I have used. It is not theory. It is not something I've read. It's not hypothetical. If I haven't used it in my own career successfully, you're not going to hear about it. Everything you hear in this podcast series is information, is knowledge. Processes that I have used and I have used successfully. That's where we're headed.
Now I'd like to shift gears and ask the question, how is your career going to unfold over time? How is your technical career, your engineering, scientific, technical career going to evolve over time? Can you expect a specific path? Can you even control a specific path? Can you make a career happen in a specific way or is it going to look haphazard? That's what I want to talk to you about now. What can you expect long term as your career evolves? As your career develops? Do you have any form of control and how much control do you really have? When we start off as engineers, or scientists or technologists, we think we have a pretty good idea of where our career might go. Now, in today's environment, I understand that it might be difficult sometimes to get the job that you want, and to be certain that where you're headed is where you really want to end up.
But, generally speaking, we often think as engineers, scientists, technologists that we have a pretty good handle on how our career's going to unfold, and if we do this process here, if we move in this direction in our career, we're going to end up at this other place in our career. X will lead to Y, and Y will lead to Z, and we have this idea of a path that we want to go down. Even if the path is not very clear, we certainly have a end result that we want to achieve. We want to be an aeronautical engineer. We want to be an astronaut. We want to be an electrical engineer. We want to work for a company doing construction, civil engineering, whatever it might be. We have this in our idea in our minds about what it is that we think we'd like to have as the process of our career and the end result of our career.
There are plenty of examples out there that make it look like that is really the case. I have read some examples of US astronauts who talk about the fact that they began as children thinking that they wanted to be an astronaut, and low and behold as they began to move in their career, they got a degree in aeronautical engineering, or a degree in mechanical engineering, or whatever it might be in some scientific discipline perhaps. They always had this idea that they would become an astronaut. Perhaps as they went into the military and became pilots, and as they moved through that curriculum of being a pilot and that career of being a pilot, perhaps they became test pilots, and now all of a sudden they were in a position to volunteer or to apply for an astronaut position. As test pilots, they went ahead and applied, and as a test pilot they got the position, and now all of a sudden they're an astronaut.
We look at this career and we say, "My gosh, this is how it's done." You go from point A to point B, you know you want to be an astronaut, and low and behold you become an astronaut. But at the same time, the question that I ask myself is how many other children wanted to be astronauts that didn't end up astronauts. The idea in my mind that you can start off as a child or as a young person thinking, "This is what I want to do. This is what I want to be," and actually achieve that is probably more like one in a million as opposed to just work very hard and you'll get there. The reason for this is not any fault of your own. This is not something that you can say, "Gee, if I don't get where I want to be at the end of my career, I must have done something wrong." Life doesn't really work that way.
By and large, you're going to get to the end of your career and you're going to look back, and you're going to ask yourself, "How the heck did I get here?" Because for 90% of us as engineers, scientists, technologists, our career is going to be a meandering path that will not be a straight line. We will get to the end of our careers and we'll look back, and we will probably be in a significantly different place than we ever expected ourselves to be. I want to begin to put into your mind, into your way of thinking about your career that this is not something to be upset about if your career doesn't go exactly as you want. In fact, in my experience, the more you have the flexibility with your career, the more you will be successful in building the career that you ultimately desire.
Being stubborn about my career has to go a certain way, I think actually limits your ability to achieve what it is you want to achieve. Your ability to be flexible enough to adapt to different possibilities to present themselves as your career advances, will actually allow you to achieve what it is you want to achieve. You may start down a path, and it may seem to be the most logical beginning point for your career, and then an opportunity presents itself, and you're going to be faced with, "Do I take this opportunity? Do I pass it up? Do I become a technical manager or do I stay technically oriented? How much of a technical manager should I become? Should I stay part-time technical professional? Individual contributor and part-time technical manager? Or should I opt for one versus the other?" These are questions that no one else can answer but you, and the answer that you'll give will more than likely change depending on where you are in your career. Not just your career, but your personal life as well.
You may decide to start a family. You may decide that what you really enjoy doing is traveling. You may decide that what you really enjoy doing is actually working with people and only being partially involved in the technical aspect of projects. As you move through your career, I'm going to suggest to you and I'm gonna submit to you to be gentle with yourself. To be easy on the process of how you move forward. That doesn't mean that you throw your arms up and give up on your dream. I think it's very important to have a dream regarding what you want your career to look like, and where you want your career to end up. I wouldn't be the first one to say, "Hold on to that dream. Hold onto it very tightly and be sure and clear about what you would like to achieve.
At the same time, you want to realize that you may change that dream as your career progresses and as you mature in your personal life and in your professional life. The dream may morph. The dream may change. The dream may completely reverse itself and that's okay. The key is to always be aware at every step of the path what you are doing, and what your choices are that your making. You may not know where the choices you're making will lead you. That's understandable, that's life. There's not much you can do about that. There are times when you're going to make a choice and a year later you're going to go, "Why did I ever decide to do this?" I hate it. Okay, fine. Regroup, back up, take a new direction. At the same time, you may end up making a choice and all of sudden it opens doors that you never thought were possible.
This process of moving through life and having your career, it's not at all like F = MA = IR. It's not at all like an equation in physics that defines the universal laws. It is a much messier process, and all I'm suggesting to you is be aware that that messy process is coming. Be aware that you're going to be in the middle of that messy process, and be okay with it. As you move forward, you're learn more, you'll expand more, and in this series, I'll do my best to give you information, and ideas, and perspectives that will actually allow you to understand how the choices you're making may affect your career downstream. If you like what you're hearing in this series, please like the podcast, and sign up. I'll see you in the next podcast. Until then, be well.
Thank you so much for listening. If you're someone who wants to advance their career without making the missteps and the mistakes that can derail your career, please subscribe to the show. If you have a moment, head over to iTunes, and leave a rating and a review. That would help so much. With that, I'll see you in the next episode of the Engineer to Leader Podcast.
Copyright 2018 STCerri International
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