TECC 265: Finding Career Fulfillment in Your Engineering Career

In this episode, Jeff Perry, MBA talks about how you can find career fulfillment. He shares a framework that will help you on your journey and some actions that you can start taking right away to get on the path to engineering career fulfillment. Here Are Some of the Key Points Discussed About Finding Career Fulfillment: Career growth is a process, but you can accelerate this process by taking the correct steps. Building your career can be compared to a series of design experiments or prototypes. It is an iterative process. Each step in your career is like experimenting. Collect data on if you are enjoying this step in your career and if you are utilizing your skills. Look at how you can continue to improve the balance of the different areas of your life and how it fits in with your larger goals. Learn from your experiences, collect the correct data, and then use that data to make the best decisions as you move forward. The three main phases of the Next Level Engineering Career Formula are the foundation, strategy, and execution. Building your career must be like building a building. The first phase of the Next Level Engineering Career Formula is to set up a strong and stable foundation that will last for a very long time. The 3 Factors of Building a Strong Foundation for Career Fulfillment: 1. Mindset Your mindset is like the lens through which you see the world. It is how you view yourself, the people around you, and the situations that come your way. When making a change in your life, you sometimes prescribe behaviors that you must change. You prescribe the actions and the activities you need to take, but you neglect what you believe about yourself through that process. It causes you to quickly revert to your old ways. If you have not changed your mindset, your behavioral change will not last. First, gain awareness of your thinking patterns and beliefs about yourself to be successful at making changes in your life and career. Try a mindset shift where you think of ways you can serve other people instead of only thinking about what you should do. It will make you more successful, get better results, people will recognize the results, and you will enjoy yourself because you are doing it out of service to other people. 2. Career Clarity Career clarity is not like a treasure map that you can follow and know what you will do every step of the way. Trying to plot a career treasure map can cause engineers to suffer from analysis paralysis and get stuck where they are. Career clarity is to know who the person is that you want to become and use your goals, values, interests, and passions to chart the direction there. The path might be a winding one because of new opportunities that arise. If your path is still heading in the right direction, then you are still on the right track. Consider the schools of experience and what you need to learn to become the person you want to become. 3. Personal Branding Personal branding is about connecting and communicating who you are, what you bring to the table, and what makes you different. People closest to you know a lot about you because they spend time with you. Personal branding is about communicating with people who do not know you and helping them learn who you are and what you have to offer. To build a personal brand that stands out, you must use something called the genius zone. A genius zone is an area that is unique to you. The combination of the skills you have can become your genius zone. To identify your genius zone, make a list of all your skills and interests that you bring to the table. It is a combination of the technical skills, soft skills, and even hobbies that you have. Look at your list and find where you get the most interested and excited. See where your passion starts to bubble up.