You're listening to The Engineer to Leader Podcast, episode number two. Today we're talking all about the specific phases of your engineering career path, 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. And 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. So 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 a career that you want? This is The Engineer to Leader Podcast.
Hello, this is Steven Cerri. Thank you for joining me on this podcast. If you're on this podcast, you're probably interested in understanding how your career will evolve over time. And it definitely will evolve and I think it goes through a series of specific phases which I'm going to be talking about in this podcast. And whether you're a manager, whether you're a newly minted engineer, scientist, technologist, joining the workforce for the first time, or whether you have some career time behind you, it's always a good idea to have some sense, some perspective, some expectation of what your career path might be like. So even if you're a manager and you're listening to this, you can get some concept of how you might want to talk to your direct reports, to your employees, about where their career might be going. There are a number of ways to talk about careers and there are number of ways to break careers into various phases. There are probably hundreds of ways to do that.
I've taken an approach that essentially breaks down the engineering, scientific, technological career into four phases. The reason I picked four phases is I think it makes sense, at least from my experience and my perspective. And those four phases represent the major shifts, not only in what you do as a engineer going forward in your career, but how you have to think. And how you have to be in terms of your own actions, your behaviors, your thought processes. If you'll remember, at the beginning of these podcasts, I talk often about the concept of mindset. That mindset is important. So in this presentation, not only am I going to be talking about the four phases from the perspective of what you do, but also the four phases with respect to your mindset and how those mindsets actually have to shift in order for you to be successful. So before we go into this, I'm going to give you a choice.
Depending upon whether you like to listen to the podcast or whether you want to listen to the podcast and go along with the chart. The choice is yours. If you want to see a chart about what I'm going to be talking about, you can go to www engineertoleader.com. And on the right hand side, upper right hand side of that home page, you'll see a link for podcasts. Click on that link, go to the podcast, select podcast number two, and download the pdf of the chart for your navigating your career path. You can then look at that chart as you're listening to the podcast, or if you don't necessarily want to do that, you can just listen to the podcast. I will make sure that the podcast works well for you whether or not you have the chart in front of you.
Alright, so that being said, let's talk about the four phases of your technical career paths. Phase one, as far as I'm concerned, is your education. Now, many people don't talk about your technical education as a phase in your career path. Many people think of career path as being when you first enter the workforce. And that just doesn't make sense to me, and the reason it doesn't make sense is because the mindset that you require when you're getting your technical education has an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage of course is that you're going to learn what to do. During your technical education, you're going to learn your craft. You're going to learn your technical skills that will allow you to be successful in the work environment. At the same time, your technical education is going to generally produce a mindset that will actually sabotage your growth long-term.
The mindset you require during your education will be just fine for the first two or three or four years of your workforce process. But after that, what you've learned in terms of how you perceive yourself when you were getting your education will actually hinder your success moving forward long-term. So we want to be aware of the fact that as you're getting your degree, as you're getting your training, you are going to graduate as an engineer, a scientist, technologist, whatever the situation might be, but that doesn't necessarily prepare you for a long-term career. It prepares you to do your technical work, but not necessarily your long-term career.
Then phase two is what I call individual contributor or lead. And maybe it's individual contributor and lead because you're going to start off generally speaking right out of school as an individual contributor, which means you're going to be evaluated on the work you do. Your performance review is going to be a measure of what you generally produce by yourself. Now, that doesn't mean that you're not working with a team. That doesn't mean that you're not participating in a give and take process with other members of other departments, of other members of your organization. But it does mean that generally 80 percent of your performance review will be dictated by how well you do your technical work. That is what is meant by an individual contributor. And most managers understand that they are going to be looking at you because they've hired you to do a job, to do some technical capability and they're going to be measuring you on whether or not you can achieve that. Now, this only works for a period of time, for a limited period of time. You may jump around from one organization, one company to another, and almost every time you do that in your early career, you're going to be an individual contributor because people are going to hire you to do a specific job.
However, after you've been inside a specific organization for let's say two, three or four years, the organization's going to look at you a little bit differently. And here's the way they look at you. After three or four years you've been working inside an organization, you know the organization. You know what kind of technical problems the organization is trying to solve. Your team is trying to solve. You have acquired a perspective that not only informs you about what you're supposed to do from a technical perspective, but why you're supposed to do it. Because the organization that you live in, the team that you live in has a mission, has a vision, has a series of projects that they're trying to solve. And you're part of that team. Well all of a sudden you're pretty valuable. You're just not a hired gun anymore. You're just not someone who can do a technical job.
You have some perspective that is larger than somebody who just steps in from the outside world as an employee. And so the organization is going to want to use that accumulated experience that you have. And so they're invariably, unless you really, really are clearly not lead material, they're going to want you to become a lead. Which means you're going to be a technical lead, a project lead. You're not a manager. Because as a manager, you'd be doing 100 percent management work. And at this phase in your early career, they're not prepared to give you a 100 percent management job because they don't know if you can manage well. So the first phase in moving you out of the individual contributor slot is going to be called a technical lead or a project lead or a lead engineer. Now, that term indicates that you're doing two things at once, not one. As a team lead, technical lead, project lead, an engineering lead, invariably you're going to be doing some individual contributor technical work and you're going to be doing some management work.
So as a technical lead, you might have maybe two or three people working for you. You don't have hire and fire authority over those people, but you have the ability to guide them, to monitor their projects, to make sure their schedule is on track, to make sure they have the resources they need, to make sure the deliverables that they have to deliver are what is asked for and delivered on time. At the same time, you're going to be doing your own technical project work. Now, this is going to be, in my estimation, the most challenging job you're ever going to have. Because you're going to have one foot in the technical world and one foot in the management world. And many engineers, scientists, technologists, get into this position and they assume that the technical people who are working with them and working for them are competent or professional and they don't have to monitor them much.
So the first time a technical lead gets this role, they kind of focus on their own technical work and assume that the other people are going to do their technical work. And invariably something happens and the other technical people maybe don't deliver on time or have problems delivering the product that was expected. And all of a sudden the technical lead is the one responsible and the one that's tagged for not having the team deliver what they were supposed to deliver on time. And this can really put a blemish on your record. So this phase two is extremely critical. You want to be careful about how you become a lead and what your responsibilities are and you have to be aware that your job is not just to do your technical work and assume that you're just doing the paperwork of monitoring the other people who are working for you.
Your job is to make sure the project comes in on time and that the people who are working for you actually deliver the project on time in the way it's expected. So this is a touchy position, phase two. And so the reason phase two is such a sensitive and risky position is because it requires generally for the engineers, scientists, technologists, to change their mindset. They have to incorporate not only being an individual contributor but they have to couple that with being willing to oversee and direct and get involved with other people who are doing their technical work as individual contributors. So this is the first phase where your mindset actually has to shift from being an individual contributor to being part time individual contributor and part time manager. Not full time, but part time manager. And this is tricky. This is not an easy thing to do and you want to be aware of it because I have coached a number of engineers who try to make the transition to lead, don't do very well, and then they get blamed for not being good management material. And they get put back into individual contributor roles and never get a chance to be a manager ever again in that organization.
Phase three nowis another major transition, not only in what you do but also a mindset change. Phase three is a transition to either management or to a technical expert. Invariably, if you stay with an organization long enough, they're probably not going to want you to stay as a lead. Some people end up staying as leads and they're kind of bouncing back and forth between doing individual contributor work and managing a small team and back and forth. But that's really not where the organization wants you to head. The organization generally is going to want you to pick either management or technology. At some point, you're going to gain so much experience in the organization. So much experience with what the organization wants to solve and how they want to go about solving it, that they're going to want you to pick whether or not you want to be a manager full time or whether you want to be a technical subject matter expert.
Either one is fine. But you're going to have to decide. And if you can decide it consciously, it's much better than kind of migrating over to it haphazardly. So phase three is when you pick what kind of future you want to develop. It doesn't mean you have to stay there. You can always go back to individual contributor. You can always move to technical lead and individual contributor. And if you become a special subject matter expert, you can always move to management. And if you don't like management, you can always move to subject matter expert if you have the capability. If the organization has that flexibility. So this is phase three. Not only do you end up doing something different like being a subject matter expert or being a manager, but the mindset that will allow you to be successful in either of those positions has to come along with it.
Then there's phase four. And phase four is essentially a senior manager, senior executive, or a senior consultant in the organization. In the fourth phase of your career, this is where you become the senior person regardless of whether you're in management or whether you're in technology. You become the person who is looked upon as having a lot of not only knowledge but experience and judgment. And so this is phase four. This is just before your retirement. So phase one is your education. Phase two is your individual contributor and lead, and this can last anywhere from one year to 10 years or more. Phase three is your transition to either full time management or subject matter expert that can last another 10, 12, 15 years. And then phase four is your senior management, senior technical expert or senior consultant in the organization. These then are the four phases and you can expect that the organization's going to want to move you through these four phases.
Now you can opt to jump out of any of these phases at any time. But very often if you jump out of one organization in phase two to another organization, you're probably start off in phase two there. Unless you've had some experience as a lead, then they may hire you into a new organization, new company in phase three. So it really depends upon how you're perceived by the organization and what they're hiring you to do. Some organizations are just going to hire you to do, to be in phase two and be an individual contributor. And when they're done with you, they're going to let you go. This is what a contractor does, right? Contractors who focus specifically in a certain technology, they're almost always in phase two throughout their career. They're hired to do a job, to get the job done. Maybe they're going to lead. They're in phase two most of the time. On the other hand, if you have a long term career with an organization, you can expect to go through phase two and phase three and maybe even phase four.
So there you have it. That's my take on navigating your technical career path. Those are the four phases. If you found this podcast interesting, please like and sign up for the podcast and I'll see you next time. 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. And 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.
Building the engineering career you want requires more than just knowledge. It takes a different mindset, a different perspective. That's something that college doesn't teach us. If you are truly interested in building your long-term career success, then go to www.engineertoleader.com. Engineer to leader is one word, www.engineertoleader.com, and sign up for the VIP waitlist for my upcoming course called Building the Engineering Career You Want. I've created this program just for engineers, scientists, and technologists who want to create and advance their careers to create the career and the life they really want. So sign up on the wait list now and be notified the next time an opening is available. There's no commitment on your part. Just sign up and I'll notify you when there's an opening and then you can decide if you want to take the course. I'll see you in the next podcast. Be well.
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