| Unwritten Law |
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Maintain your employability as well as your subordinates.
It is the rare engineer who has a single employer for a whole career, and employers understand this. So it follows that it is unreasonable to expect engineers to accept becoming useless to other potential employers, however invaluable they have become to their current employer. If your skills and knowledge are valuable only to your current employer, you are in trouble. Sooner or later, for one reason or another, your employer will no longer be interested in buying skills, and you will have no place else to sell them. Be an adherent and proponent of life-long learning |
Many recent graduates mistakenly believe that their education ended with their bachelor degrees. Here is the reality. If you want to maximize your abilities as an engineer and your value to your company, your education will never end.
Continuing education is an important ingredient in staying connected to advancing technology and in learning new skills and abilities (both technical and non-technical). By learning and exposing yourself to new ideas and new methods, you make yourself more valuable to the company, as well as open up new areas of interest for yourself. Your new knowledge or skill might enable to you to solve problems more quickly or help develop a new process or product that provides the company a cost savings or produces new revenue. And that, at its core, is what engineers do.
Some guidelines to getting the most out of continuing education:
- Take advantage of the in-company training programs offered to you (even if it means staying after work).
- Check out your company's tuition reimbursement plan to see if you are eligible and how to maximize the benefits.
- Consider taking short courses that are applicable to your job function offered by professional societies like ASME or local universities. (Many are now offered online).
- Pursue an advanced degree.
- Keep a log of all the courses and training you complete, and make sure copies of completion certificates are placed in your employment file.
Continuing education does not guarantee job advancement. What counts is how well you use that new knowledge in the performance of your duties. So it is important, when deciding on what courses or continuing education programs to pursue, that they can be applied to support your job function.
  (transcript) - Advice on courses and continuing education - Julie Pollitt, NASA/Ames
(transcript) - Some international and business perspectives on the masters degree - Cecilia Gotama, Syska & Hennessy
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