TECC 256: Finding the Right Engineering Career Path (That Best Fits Your Professional Passion)

In this episode, we talk to Zakary Smith, an entrepreneur, innovator, and the founder of Instaversal, an engineering company that creates true partnerships that enable companies that develop and scale products to accelerate their complete product development lifecycle, connecting with a vetted global supply chain of experts. Zack provides some great tips on how you can find the right engineering career path that best suits your passions. Engineering Quotes: Here Are Some of the Key Points Discussed About Finding the Right Engineering Career Path: There are two main areas you must focus on when choosing the correct engineering career path. First, look at your skills and competencies. Look what your natural aptitudes are and which strengths you can build on to stand out from everyone else. Second, look at your interests and passions and see how you can align your skills and competencies with them. Sales engineering is like the blood of the engineering body. If you take this revenue portion out of the engineering body, the entire body cannot function. There are many ways in an engineering business to acquire this revenue and keep the system functioning. In sales engineering, there are various KPIs that you can focus on, but they are different from the technical KPIs. These KPIs consist of the number of leads generated, conversion rate, and total sales generated. The engineering part of sales engineering is about knowing how the technical aspects of the product being sold can benefit the customer. There are many different industries within engineering, and there are many engineering areas within these industries. To choose the correct industry to start your engineering career path, find an industry that best suits your skills, competencies, interests, and passions. Engineering students must try to get work experience before they graduate. It is one of the best things they can do to set themselves up for after school. Get experience that validates what you learn at school and will, in turn, help you focus on the areas that you are interested in. It will help you better focus on your engineering career path when you get out of school and position yourself ahead of the competition in interviews. Some key areas you should look at before you graduate are: do you want to work for a small or large company, what industry you are interested in, the area you want to work in, and your salary requirements. Make a Q-chart to score the different options you have to find what is most important to you. Use your network to get referrals. A hiring company prioritizes referred candidates versus people coming through the general application pool. Onshape is product development software that could be the future of CAD design. It is open source software that has a JavaScript module for developing custom modules. It is not only for product development — it also produces workflows for your organization. You can create mobile apps embedded into the software, which add value to your engineering workflow. It is a SaaS-based model that works directly through a browser and has sharable secure files. Additive Works is exciting manufacturing software that is used by large companies like Apple and Tesla. It can be used in 3D printing and to develop new material alloys a lot cheaper and faster. It also uses artificial intelligence to improve workflow utilization and margins for companies. Your professional and personal lives do not need to align perfectly. By disassociating between them, you will get more gratification and a better focus in these areas. More in This Episode… In the Take Action Today segment of the show, Zakary Smith talks about how you can stay current with technologies to press forward in your career. About the Guest, Zakary Smith At Instaversal, Zak can fulfill his vision of a fully integrat...