You can take the first job you can find, then drift from job to job as your supervisors direct and as opportunities arise. To some degree you will have to do these things whether you like it or not. On the other hand, you can at least influence your career by deciding in advance your preferences among alternate career branch points, and you can help it in a large number of specific ways. Regardless of your career path, there are some facts, ideas, and specific recommendations that will increase your success.
Understanding Yourself
One of the best things you can do for your career is to learn to understand your real reasons for your thoughts, arguments, and actions. If you are human, they are often reasons of feeling and emotion rather than reasons of logic. In dealing with others, one of the most effective things you can do is to understand the other's real reasons, which may be very different from his or her expressed arguments.
Branch Points Generalist-specialist
There is a branch point for you between generalist and specialist. (A generalist is one who knows less and less about more and more until he or she knows nothing about everything; a specialist is one who knows more and more about less and less until he or she knows everything about nothing.)
Generalists suffer from the anxiety that they do not have the depth of knowledge that specialists have on any subject they deal with. On the other hand, they can bring to bear on a design problem a diversity of knowledge which the specialists know nothing about, and they may have an insight into the realities of the problem (conditions of service, general specifications, manufacturing, available materials and components, forms of power and energy, etc.) which specialists may lack. They also have the economic security that they will not become professionally obsolescent overnight by the announcement of a new invention or the unexpected termination of a program's funding or some of the other shocks described below. The best academic program for future generalists is engineering science rather than any branch of engineering.
Specialists are on the cutting edge of their technology and may well advance that edge. They need fear no one's pointing out gaps in their knowledge and skill. They are sought after because of their definable expertise. If their field is in demand, they may command high pay. They are usually proficient in mathematics and use mathematics and computers extensively in their work. They have up-to-the-minute knowledge of what their competitors are doing. But all this is only in their specialty because they lack the time to acquire the knowledge and experience of working in other fields.
These descriptions are of the end points of a spectrum. There are real people with all possible combinations of breadth and depth. The point of the discussion for you is that you should establish a career policy to suit your aptitudes and tastes on this and the other issues described below and then bias your decisions, your requests to management, and your continued technical study and reading to move yourself in accordance with that policy.
High tech-low tech
There is a branch point among high, medium, and low technology. Your choice depends on your own judgment of your tastes and aptitudes. The world needs all three. Apply to companies in whose technical level you will be comfortable and successful.
Technical work-management
The next career branch point is the choice between technical work and management. Almost all training in engineering schools is technical. M.B.A. schools teach management. Both schools leave the other branch's knowledge to be picked up at work, at great cost to all concerned except the schools.
As an engineer you deal with a world which is primarily physical. Much of this book deals with the human world you must also face. Managers deal primarily with people, politics, and administration and secondarily with making or approving decisions requiring technical judgment. Managers have more power, more prestige, and better offices and secretarial help, make more money, get to talk to senior managers, feel important, and are on a promotion ladder with a higher top. They are less likely to be trapped in a narrow specialty without wanting to be a specialist. (A class of manager is the engineer-entrepreneur who is lord of all he or she surveys but who may not survey very much.) All these benefits tend to draw engineers into management with a mixed bag of successes and failures.
Some large companies have reduced the transfer temptation by setting up an engineering ladder parallel to the management ladder with titles, pay, and badges of rank to match rung for rung. The aptitudes for management are as different from the aptitudes for engineering as are the contents of the two fields of work. For engineering management you need both sets of aptitudes. Do you have them?
Big company-small company
The next branch point to discuss is big company versus small company. The advantages of working for a big company are:
- The magnitude and complexity of the projects are larger.
- The facilities are greater: computer, laboratory, shop, and office equipment and their operators.
- The corps of experts whom you can consult and from whom you can learn is greater.
- Career guidance by capable supervisors may occur.
- There are tall ladders of promotion and pay which you may be able to scale.
- There is public prestige in your association with a famous company name.
- The perks and benefits (level of medical insurance, payment for jury duty, stock plan, pension, etc.) may be greater.
The disadvantages of working for a big company are:
- Greater conformance to rigid rules by accounting, personnel, purchasing, and other departments is required. There is much more paperwork.
- There is greater compression into narrow specialties and small fractions of an overall program.
- Slower results may be caused by having to follow fixed procedures and delays in work that you delegate to other departments.
- It is much harder to exercise initiative except in your assigned narrow area because of the organizational specialization and the long list of approvals required to authorize something new.
- You get to know more of what is going on besides your own assign-ment.
- You are known to senior management, and you know a large fraction of all the employees.
- Your assigned responsibilities are broader.
- You can grow in scope and responsibility much faster. Reviews may come when they are appropriate, not on the calendar.
Some benefits and penalties are independent of company size.
Job security depends on the individual company and its business success, not on the company's size. Success and failure come to all sizes. Very large corporations rarely go bankrupt, but when a program or a product line shrinks, its staff gets laid off. It happened to me.
Level of technology depends on the individual company. Many small companies are started and succeed because they are the leaders in the development of an advanced technology. Many large companies make technically elementary products, with slow technical progress, but make and sell them in huge quantities.
Pay scales for the same job vary little with company size but may vary significantly with industry. Professional society and trade journals periodically publish this information and related data.
