The transition from college to the real world is a challenging one. College taught you how to succeed in your career, but how do you succeed in adulthood? Luckily, you chose a career in engineering. When you choose a career in engineering, it gives you so much more than a career. Engineering gives you a new lifestyle as well to help you succeed in adulthood.
Engineering led both my husband and I to be very successful very quickly. We were able to buy our first house, which is also our dream house, when I was 23. It gave us the ability to pay off over $130,000 worth of student loans within 5 years of graduating from college. This prosperity was made possible not only from the high starting salaries, but also because of the skills we acquired.
Skills That Make Engineers Successful Adults
Engineering has given us much more than just monetary benefits. It teaches many skills that are transferable to all aspects of life. These skills are often referred to as soft skills. Soft skills are needed in order to be able to do your engineering job well, but they are not technical skills. These skills are often not taught, but developed through your course work in college and then perfected as a working professional.
Soft skills often separate an okay engineer from a great engineer. If two engineers completed all of their deliverables at the end of the year, the engineer with the best soft skill set is the one who will get the promotion or better bonus. Soft skills are also a big factor in interviews. Your resume speaks to your technical skills, but your soft skills are what will shine through on an interview and get you the job.
Three soft skills that make engineers successful adults include problem solving, decision making, and communication.
1. Problem Solving
As an engineer, your daily tasks involve problem solving. Overcoming challenges are the one constant in engineering. This is what makes it so enjoyable and interesting! As an engineer, you will know how to:
- Define a problem
- Break the problem down into manageable tasks
- Put a timeline to the tasks to determine how long it will take to have a resolution to the problem
- Then execute the tasks to work towards a solution.
The skill of being able to fully understand a problem and break it down into actionable tasks, is a universal skill that will make you more effective in your personal life.
This sounds straight forward, but it is amazing how many people lack the ability to problem solve. It is not often taught directly in school, but indirectly through your engineering course work. In order to complete the assignments, you will develop your own problem solving techniques that work for you. As an engineer, this is a critical skill to be successful and you will get a lot of practice with it.
This will help you in your adult life by being confident in yourself to work through problems and confront them head on. Some people avoid problems. Sometimes because they are overwhelmed by how to resolve them or they do not like confrontation. As an engineer, it will be an essential part of your daily work, which will give you the tools to confront problems in your everyday life.
Problem Solving In Everyday Life
My problem solving skills came in handy when we decided to renovate our kitchen. We were doing a complete remodel. This involved knocking down multiple walls and rearranging the layout to create an open concept.
After a lot of research we decided to go with a company that provided a project manager in addition to a contractor. Our experience with other projects was that some contractors had issues with scheduling work and finishing in a timely manor. We thought the addition of a project manager would help take some of the stress off of us.
Unfortunately, we were wrong. The project manager laid out a timeline at the beginning of the project. After that, we never saw or heard from her. When the timeline started to slip she said there was nothing she could do and deferred to the contractor.
This is when I had to jump into the project manager role and manage the project. I worked with all of the different parties involved in the project, including the contractor, electrician, plumber, material vendors (flooring, countertops, cabinets, fixtures). My oversight ensured the project was completed on time.
From my engineering practice, I was able to identify an issue, take action, and find a resolution. If I had not taken action and deferred to the project manager, our kitchen would have taken months to finish. Being an engineer gave me the confidence to jump in and resolve a problem. In contrast, most other home owners may have deferred to the people they hired.
2. Decision Making
In engineering, you will use data to drive your decision making. When you are trying to resolve a problem, you will need to identify knowledge gaps. Then, you can put a plan together for how you are going to fill in those gaps. This will help you answer key questions and make decisions in order to move to the next phase.
For example, if you are trying to choose a material for a part, you may have narrowed your decision down to a few different materials. These materials may all have properties that meet the specification for the part. Then, you would develop a build and test plan to assess which material performs the best based on a set of criteria.
Weighted Decision Matrix
Decision matrices are one tool that can help compare options based on the specific criteria you have, especially when there is no clear choice. An example of a weighted decision matrix is below:
You can list your criteria on the left, such as cost, manufacturability, and your other specifications you are testing for, such as tensile strength and durability. Then, you can assign weights to your criteria depending on how important they are to your part and project.
In the example above, there are 7 criteria so the weighting used is 1-7. One is the least important and seven is the most important. Finally, you execute your test plan for gathering the data to assess each criteria.
This is a great way to use data to drive your decision making process.
Weighted Decision Matrix For Choosing A College
In everyday life we make many decisions. Some are easy that require little thought, like what you are going to watch on TV. But some are challenging and require data before you can make the best decision, such as choosing a college, buying a house, getting a pet, or changing jobs.
You can use the decision matrix analysis to help with the challenging decisions you have to make in everyday life. For example, a decision matrix would be a great tool to use if you are trying to decide which college to go to and there seems like there is no clear winner.
Your criteria is everything that is important to you, such as location, major options, size of the college, and cost of the college, just to name a few.
After defining your criteria, you can assign weights to each one in order of the importance to you. Finally, you can compare the colleges you are trying to choose between!
Here is an example of a decision matrix you could use to help you choose which college to attend:
How To Fill In The Decision Matrix
- Fill in the criteria in the left hand column that is important to you when looking at colleges.
- Assign a weight to the criteria depending on how important it is to you. There are seven criteria so the weight we assign to each is 1-7. One is the least important and seven is the most important to you. In the example above, having many major options was most important and where the college was located was the least important.
- Fill in the names of the colleges you are comparing at the top of the columns labeled, “College 1”,”College 2”, etc.
- For the score, you can choose another rating system. In the decision matrix below, I am using a 1-5 rating scale. One is the worst score and five is the best. For example, maybe you are debating between majoring in mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, and civil engineering. College 3 in the example below has all three majors, so that college would receive a score of five for the “major options” criterion. College 2 only offers mechanical engineering, so that college may get a score of one.
- To calculate the total score for each criteria, you multiply the weighting by the score. The cost of College 1 would have a total of 6 (6×1).
- For the overall total at the bottom of each total column, you sum all of the totals for each criterion together. See the completed decision matrix below.
Interpreting The Results
Using the weighted decision matrix tool, College 3 has the highest score and is the recommended option to move forward with.
This demonstrates how the decision matrix can be used to make an objective decision when comparing similar options. Especially when you think there may not be a clear choice. By adding weight to the factors, allows you to really think about what is most important to you. Then you can consider how each school meets the criteria.
Decision matrices are used often in engineering to drive decisions but they are also a great tool that can be used in everyday life!
3. Communication
In engineering you have to work with many different people, such as team members, people in different functions (quality, regulatory, marketing), management, and vendors, just to name a few. Communication is critical because you have to be able to let everyone know your ideas and plan, so they understand it and want to help you achieve your project goals.
For example, you may need your engineering team members to complete a task for you. Most of the time people on your team are not your direct reports. This means you do not manage their responsibilities. They probably have a lot of other action items to work on besides what you are asking them to do.
Effective communication can help you build relationships. Then, people will prioritize the work you are asking from them instead of blowing you off and working on another priority. Communication is also key to ensure people are producing exactly what you need, such as running the correct test or making the correct change to a prototype build.
Communication In Everyday Life
My communication skills came in handy when I was planning our wedding. This can seem like a daunting task, which is why people usually hire wedding planners. We did not hire a wedding planner because I really enjoy the organizing and planning of events.
I started by defining our budget, creating a spreadsheet to organize everything, setting a timeline, and developing a vendor selection process. Then, I conducted a lot of research on all of the elements for a wedding to really define what we wanted.
There were so many different vendors that I had to communicate with, including the photographer, videographer, wedding site coordinator, and limo drivers. Communication was key because I had to let them know our vision for the wedding and what we expected from them. Then, I had to get them all to work together to create the wedding of our dreams.
My communication skills really helped me excel at planning the wedding and gave us the best day we could have imagined.
Engineering Is So Much More Than A Career
Problem solving, decision making, and communication are just some of the many soft skills engineering teaches you to help you become a successful adult! This is why engineering is so much more than a career, it is a way of life.
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