Designing your ideal engineering career….
This post is based on an interview I did with Jessica Smith, a younger engineer working as a transportation planner at the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) in Fairbanks, Alaska. In the interview we focused on the idea of creating the ideal engineering career.
I have been trying to convince engineers for the last 3 years that they can create or design their ideal engineering career and lifestyle and I finally found one who is living hers and through this post she shares how she did it and how you can too!
The interview was an hour and a half during which time we covered the entire process of career and lifestyle design in detail, so to try to put it into a format that is easy to read, I have broken it down into 10 recommendations. Essentially these recommendations are those that Jess gave in response to the overall question, “What would you tell engineers who are trying to find the perfect job for them and ultimately create an ideal engineering career?”
Jess used all of these strategies to recently leave a research assistant position at North Carolina State University’s Institute for Transportation Research & Education (ITRE). The position was within the ITRE Highway Systems Group, funded by a year-long grant from the NCDOT. Jess completed her contracted time with ITRE, and relocated to her new position as transportation planner for the MPO in Fairbanks, Alaska. You will hear about her journey through these recommendations below.
1-Decide what is most important to you. One of the first things you must do in trying to design your ideal engineering career is decide what aspect of your career and life is the most important to you. Is it the type of job you have, where you live, or the amount of salary you earn? Your flexibility plays a huge role in determining this. For example, do you have young kids that you do not want to relocate, or aging parents that you must remain close to? In Jess’s case she was super-flexible when going through this career/lifestyle design. She said, “I didn’t have a preference of where I lived or how much money I made, I wanted to work at a job that I enjoyed – period.” Your profession may also play a huge part in this decision. For example, Jess is in the transportation industry and since there is transportation everywhere, there were no geographic limits on her search based on profession.