Engineering Your Future Launching a Successful Entry-Level Technical Career in Today's Business Environment

Engineering Your Future: Launching a Successful Entry-Level Technical Career in Today's Business Environment provides the recent engineering or other technical graduate or the entry-level technical person with basic, pragmatic management and leadership concepts, knowledge, and skills. These results-oriented fundamentals should be immediately useful on the job and will also help the young professional learn more efficiently from day-to-day professional experiences. Technical competency, although necessary, is not sufficient for the young engineer or other technically educated professional who wishes to quickly realize his or her potential in the consulting business, industry, or government. Technical competency must be supplemented with basic management proficiencies and leadership understanding if the entry-level professional is to be productive for his or her employer. Unfortunately, management concepts, knowledge, and skills are typically not introduced in undergraduate engineering and related curricula, and virtually nothing is taught about leadership. Accordingly, management and leadership must be learned by doing, often inefficiently at high monetary cost to the employer and at the risk of jeopardizing the young professional's career. This is not a transition from engineering to management book. A premise of this book is that all engineers and other technical professionals are managers from day one -- at least they are managers of their time, their assignments, their relationships with others, and their careers. The best leaders in technical organizations are most likely to be those professionals who began to develop management skill and leadership understanding very early in their careers who knew, from the beginning, how to develop the soft as well as the hard side of their careers. Career management is becoming increasingly important. The parents of today's young professionals often entered into unwritten but binding contracts with their employers. In that era, the young engineer or other technical professional would typically focus on technical matters and do them well, and the employer would, in turn, agree to provide long-term employment. Increasingly, such employment contracts are vanishing, average periods of employment with a given employer are diminishing, and major organizational upheavals caused by financial difficulties, acquisitions, and mergers are increasing. Perceptive young professionals will recognize these changes, anticipate employment problems, and prepare for employment opportunities. This book will help you engineer your career. AUDIENCE The book assumes that readers are, or soon will be, graduates (BS or MS) of an engineering or other technical program with little or no engineering, business, or management experience. The book further assumes that readers want to take a proactive approach and quickly build on their technically oriented education to become even more productive members of their organization. Because of the intended audiences, senior and/or graduate student or recent graduates, the book is written to be used as either a textbook or a reference book for young professionals. It could also be used to support seminars and workshops directed at young engineers and other technical professionals. Portions of the book are intended to be of value as a textbook or reference book to young professionals outside of technical fields, that is, in business, government, and other areas. Much of the material presented in this book will also be immediately useful to students. That is, while they are students, future technical professionals can utilize some of the tools and techniques presented in this book, such as, but not limited to, time management, delegating, managing meetings, project management, total quality management, business accounting, and marketing. ORGANIZATION AND CONTENT Many aspects of management and leadership areWalesh, Stuart G. is the author of 'Engineering Your Future Launching a Successful Entry-Level Technical Career in Today's Business Environment' with ISBN 9780132210522 and ISBN 0132210525.