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Welcome to the second episode of the Engineering and Leadership podcast! This episode covers whether it is better to become a manager or a technical specialist as you move forward in your career as an engineer. I cover the pros and cons of each path and help you decide which might be best for you.

This being the only the second episode, I’d really, really love your feedback. What do you like? What don’t you like? What’s just plain ugly about the whole thing? Any and all feedback will help me produce better shows for you, so I definitely want to hear from you.

I still haven’t submitted this podcast to iTunes yet. I’m going to wait until I have a few episodes recorded before I submit to them and other podcast services. For now, you can listen directly from the player above, or download the MP3 and listen on your computer.

I hope you enjoy the show! Again, please let me know what you think in the comments section below.

Show summary

Engineers have a major decision to make in their careers at about the 5-10 year mark. They need to decide whether to become a manager or a technical specialist. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Technical specialist pros:

• Great satisfaction in doing something you’re great at
• Good pay
• Ability to focus on what’s important to you
• Lets you avoid dealing with too many “people problems”

Technical specialist cons:

• Pay isn’t as good as management (generally)
• Risk that your area of expertise becomes obsolete
• Risk that very few other companies need your expertise
• Limited opportunity for advancement, depending on the company

Management pros:

• Ability to see the bigger picture in your work
• Better pay (generally)
• Good portability of skills to other industries or companies
• Ability to work closely with people
• Good opportunity for advancement

Management cons:

• High stress, long hours (often)
• You need to learn a complete new set of skills
• Little technical work

Both paths are valid career choices, and both up their pros and cons. The main takeaway message today is that you should make the choice to pursue one or the other actively – don’t just let it happen. That way, you can prepare for your chosen path and be much more likely to succeed in your role.

Links

• www.engineeringandleadership.com/getstarted – Free 12 week engineering leadership course.
• www.engineeringandleadership.com/lynda – Link to get you a free 10-day trial of Lynda.com.
• The Engineer’s Guide to Running Productive Meetings
• What leaders should care about
• Cath’s Practical Cooking Engineering Blog
• O’net Online – Job search resource
• Payscale.com – A great salary and job research site.

Transcript

Introduction

For those looking to improve their business skills fast; This is the Engineering and Leadership Podcast

Welcome to Episode 2 of the Engineering and Leadership Podcast from, where engineering, management, and leadership come together, to help engineers like you go from good to great.

Head on over to engineeringandleadership.com/getstarted for a free course on becoming an engineering leader.

In today’s episode, you’ll learn about the two main career paths engineers can take, and which one is best for you.

Today’s episode is brought to you by the number e, and by Lynda.com, the world’s greatest digital course library. If you’d like to learn… well, anything at all, from career strategies to coding, anything really, Lynda has it. If you’d like a 10-day free trial and get access to almost 4000 videos, just head on over to www.engineeringandleadership.com/lynda.

Welcome

My dear friends, welcome to episode #2 of the Engineering and Leadership podcast. I’m your host, Pat Sweet, and it’s awesome to have to you here with me. You look great, by the way.

If this is the first time you hear the podcast, welcome! It’s only episode #2 so you haven’t actually missed that much.

This podcast is all about helping engineers go from good to great. I focus on the business side of engineering and talk about things like management, leadership, and productivity as it pertains to engineers. So, if that sounds interesting to you, great! You’re in the right place.

That being the case, why don’t you grad a seat and your favourite caffeinated beverage and lean in, because there’s lots to talk about today.

Main Content

Today I want to talk about career paths for engineers. I’ve had careers on my mind quite a bit lately. One of the biggest questions I get from my students in the Engineering Leadership course is “What should I do with my life?”

No big deal, right?

It’s a reasonable question to ask though. People stress about their careers. They want to make sure that the path they’re headed down is the right one for them. Engineers don’t want to invest a bunch of time, money, and effort into something that isn’t going to pan out in the end.

To me, there’s a major fork in the road that engineers hit somewhere at the 5-10 year mark. Most engineers just kind of decide which road to take when they get there, which is a major mistake to me. That fork in the road is the decision to move into management, or stay technical.

There are great reasons for and against both paths. Today, I want to talk about the pros and cons for each in the hopes that I can help you make the decision for yourself.

Guru Path

First, I want to talk about the Guru path. This is essentially making the decision to become a specialist in your field. This is an excellent path for many engineers. If you’re the kind of person who loves knowing everything about a certain topic, who loves to tinker, and who gets great satisfaction out of design, this could be a great choice for you. If you love to teach others and share your knowledge, this is a great path to take.

My dad is the perfect example of someone who’s become a guru. He’s a programmer with decades of experience. He loves writing code. He loves talking about the design process. He loves solving problems. He loves having deep knowledge in his field.

Dad’s an interesting case, because he’s also covered management roles during temporary vacancies. My dad is a capable manager, and a natural leader, but couldn’t stand it. He just wasn’t anywhere near as motivated by organizing people and people problems as he was writing code and solving technical problems.

If you recognize yourself in this, then maybe the Guru path is for you.

A couple points to ponder before we move on.

Choosing the guru path is not the same as deciding not to be a manager. When you get to that fork in the road, you can decide not to go down the management path, but you still have to actively decide to go down the guru path. Otherwise, you’ll just kind of sit at the fork and tread water in perpetuity.

Becoming a guru takes a lot of work. There’s the advantage of already having a technical background to springboard from, but it’s still going to take additional effort on top of that in terms of the training, education, and experience you’ll have to take on.

One potential downside of becoming a technical specialist is that you need to be careful about how narrow your expertise is. Your field can become obsolete. Maybe your company goes under and there are only a very limited number of other positions available to you to go to. Who knows? You need to be strategic about where your expertise lies, and defining it broadly enough to mitigate these risks.

Another potential downside is that staying on the technical route can sometimes be less lucrative than becoming a manager. Some companies are recognizing that this is a problem and are providing engineering specialists with salaries that are comparable to those in management roles.

But this is only some companies. I recommend you look closely into this with respect to choosing the right employer for you and your career aspirations.

Management

I read a number of years ago in that about half of Canada’s top CEOs were engineers. That blew my mind! I would have thought that most CEOs came from business of finance backgrounds.

But when you stop and think about it, engineers are, at their core, problem solvers and people who love intricate systems. A business is a perfect outlet for those skills. Beyond that, engineers often create the products and services that a company sells. It kind of makes sense for engineers to get into business. Management then, seems a sensible alternative path to becoming a technical specialist.

If you’re somebody who enjoys organizing and scheduling things, who likes business and who loves working with people and the challenges that come along with people, and feels like they need to see the bigger picture, then management may be the right path for you.

There are many benefits to becoming a manager.

Often, managers earn more than engineer. It depends on your company, but for many, management salaries tend to be higher. I should caution that this shouldn’t be the only motivator for you to get into management, or even the main reason you get into management, but it is a bonus.

Another big benefit is that management skills tend to be very portable. What you learn from becoming a project manager or a people manager can very readily be transferred to other companies or industries.

What I like most about management is being able to zoom out of a given project and see the bigger picture. I love having that context and variety in my work, and find it very motivating.

There are also downsides to management that you should be aware of:

As an engineer, you probably don’t have the skills or training to be much of a manager right away. You may have a lot of experience and knowledge related to your engineering work, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be a good manager.

If you DO want to go into management, you’ll need to bump up your skills, take courses, read books, go back to school, whatever. Many companies promote their best engineers to management in the hopes that they will be able to improve the engineering team as a whole to be like them. This is a mistake!

I’ll say it again, being a great engineer does not a great manager make. People should move into management because they want to, have the skills to do well, or at least the potential to do well.

Another problem with respect to management is that it can be very stressful. Many managers have a lot on their plate, work long hours, and are expected to be reachable at a moment’s notice. When you work in an international or global business, the problem can be exacerbated by having team members in different time zones.

This isn’t necessarily the case, and good companies will actively protect their staff and management from burning the candle at both ends, but it is a risk to be aware of.

I’ve worked with a couple engineers who would be very capable managers, but weren’t interested in the long hours, the stress and the travel involved with that particular company. I think that’s a perfectly valid position to take. When you consider taking ANY job, you need to think long and hard about whether it will help or hinder you with respect to the lifestyle you want to have.

Both management and technical specialist gigs could involve lots of travel. This might not be a great choice for someone with a young family, for example.

Another pitfall that I see in the management path is that people tend to just fall into it. Unfortunately, many of the engineers who became managers that I’ve worked with over the years were just managers because there was nowhere else for them to go in order for them to progress in their careers. Manager was just the next level up from engineer. When they were up for promotion, they took management gigs.

Again, I can’t say it enough, being a good engineer doesn’t mean you’ll be good at management, or even like management. Engineers should be making the conscious choice to make the move into management.

Now, it’s important for me to point out here that not all management gigs are created equal. The big categories of management that engineers tend to get into are people management, project management, and product management.

I don’t have the time to dig into it in this episode, but someone who wants to be a product manager may not have any interest in becoming a people manager, for example. So even if you DO decide you want to become a manager, you should be aware of what kind of manager you want to become before diving in.

Mailbag

This is the part of the show where I read your mail, comments, tweets and messages and answer your questions. I promise to read everything you send me, and I may even share your note on the podcast here.

If I chose yours as the comment or question of the week, I’ll send you a highly fashionable E&L t-shirt, 100% cotton and guaranteed to help you engineer harder.

This week’s comments:

Alex Schaefer left a comment on a post about What Leaders Should Care About. The post reminded him of two sayings he picked up from the Army: “Mission, Men, & Me” and “Mission first, Soldiers always”

Cath from practicalcookie.blogspot.ca, left a comment on my Engineer’s Guide to Running Effective meetings, saying that she has a client who runs meetings as described in the guide, and she loves it. She said “These are really great tips, so simple to implement, but all extremely effective, thanks for sharing!”

Sean Thielen sent me a really good question last week that I’d like to share. He asked if I had any tips or advice for choosing an engineering major, and how to distinguish himself.

This is really cool because Sean still hasn’t even reached university.

• Awesome because he’s thinking about his future already!
• Research jobs – onetonline.org, payscale.com
• Try to do coop placements and chose a program with coop. There’s nothing like experience to show you what things are really like.
• Do extracurriculars. I’d hire a B student with experience on design teams, sports, etc. and who worked during school over an A student who did nothing but school.
• In general, now is the time to experiment and try things out.
  Sean was thinking he liked coding but also thought running a company would be cool – very topical.

Since Sean is thinking ahead and asking the right questions at the right time in his career, I’m giving him the question of the week.

Sean, I’ll be in touch with you soon to get you your t-shirt.

The engineering toolbox

In this part of the show, I’ll share with you some kind of tool or resource that I use that I find super helpful in my own engineering career, and that I think you might also find helpful in your quest to become an engineering leader.

Today’s resource is Lynda.com. Lynda is basically a digital library with thousands of video courses – you can actually learn anything. There are lots of technical courses, like CAD, GIS, data analysis and construction, and a ton of business courses too, like project management, people management, finance, and career development.

With almost 4000 courses, there’s a little something for everyone. It’s cheaper than buying a book a month, and all the courses are taught by experts.

If you’d like to give it a shot, go to www.engineeringandmanagement.com/lynda to get a free 10-day trial so you can check it out and see if you like it.

Outroduction

That’s all the time we have for the show today. If you enjoyed the show, it would be awesome if you could leave a review on iTunes for me. If you have any ideas or thoughts on how to make the show better, please let me know that too! Just go to www.engineeringandleadership.com/episode2 to leave a comment.

Don’t forget to head on over to engineeringandleadership.com/getstarted for a course on becoming an engineering leader, and tune in next week when we discuss why you need to love your job.

Until then, take care and we’ll talk again soon.