Photo Credit: Flickr/ Mukumbura

This is the second instalment in a two-part series on using business strategy theory to get ahead in your engineering career. In the first part in the series, I wrote about the basics of business strategy and how they apply to engineers. Today, I’ll teach you more about the four strategies, and offer pros and cons for each.

The Four Possible Engineering Career Strategies

In the first instalment of this series, I introduced Harvard Business Professor Michael Porter’s four basic business strategies (Dr. Porter is an engineer, by the way). I then took it upon myself to modify them a little bit so that they could be applied to engineering careers.

To jog your memory, the four strategies for engineers were as follows:

Engineers basically have the choice to pursue either a technical career path or a management career path. They also have the choice to devote themselves to a specific, narrow industry, or to keep their skills broad to be applicable to a number of industries.

Which Strategy is Best for Me?

There is no single best engineering career strategy. Each of the four strategies can be successful and fulfilling. Just like in business strategy, the best approach is contingent on your strengths, weaknesses and preferences. What I want to do here is offer some further detail on each of the strategies to help you decide which one might be best for you.

Technical Expert + Narrow Industry Focus

I call this the Guru strategy. This is for people who have, or want to have deep technical knowledge about a very specific domain. This is the kind of career that would have you working as a professor, or a high-tech start up, or in a larger  company’s R&D department.

Gurus should consider getting at least a master’s degree in their field, if not a PhD. They should also work hard to find another Guru to apprentice with early in their career. A big R&D department or university campus would be a good place to start.

Pros

• Ability to discover new things, or new ways to apply old ideas
• Good employment opportunities if the industry is healthy
• Challenging, satisfying work
• Significant individual effort required (good for introverts)
• You get to dress a little funny and nobody says anything because you’re so darn smart

Cons

• If you get bored easily, changing industries/ expertise is hard
• Significant individual effort is required (bad for extroverts)
• Careers likely limited to bigger cities
• Trying to explain what you do to aunt Judy will be an exercise in futility

Technical Expert + Broad Industry Focus

This is the Cornerstone Strategy. Technical experts with broad industry focus are able to apply their strong technical skills in a number of important domains.

When I was in engineering school and still trying to sort out what discipline I wanted to pursue, my aunt’s father told me that I should be an electrical engineer. His reasoning was that electrical engineers could study instrumentation, and then apply those skills to any industry they wanted. That’s the essence of this strategy. The idea is still to have a strong, focused expertise on some technical domain, but for that domain to be broadly applicable across industries.

Pros

• Good job prospects, since you can move between industries
• Good variety
• Satisfaction of expertise
• Plenty of technical depth to sink your teeth into

Cons

• Normally these are well-established fields without a whole lot of innovation (Think PLCs and concrete structures)
• Higher competition for work than for the Guru

Management + Narrow Industry Focus

I call this the Niche Management Strategy. It’s important not to downplay the engineering role in the management half of my four strategies table above. Engineers who chose a path in management do not “abandon” their engineering roles. Quite the contrary. Engineering Managers in this category apply their knowledge of a certain industry or technology in order to get things done. They organize, control and lead teams and projects to success. These are managers who couldn’t possibly be replaced by someone who doesn’t have a technical background. This this kind of role, you’re making both management and engineering decisions for complex systems on a daily basis.

Pros

• Good for “big picture” people who still love the technical challenge of engineering
• Excellent opportunity to put technical skills to work in a new way
• Gives an engineers an opportunity to apply leadership and business acumen to their work
• Job security
• High likelihood of a sweet office

Cons

• Difficult to transfer over to a new industry
• Much of your time will be focused on people problems as opposed to technical problems (not a problem for everyone)
• High stress and long hours (depending on the company)
• Conflicts between your management self and your engineering self

Management + Broad Industry Focus

This is the Engineering Management Strategy. This is the management equivalent to the Cornerstone Strategy I mentioned above. This is for engineers who manage broad, less specialized projects and teams. For example, construction management, or project management could fall in this category (of course, you could be a specialist in managing specific construction projects, but you get the idea).

This strategy is good for people who want the flexibility of being able to apply their skills in different ways and in different industries. It’s also good for engineers who have strong business acumen.

Pros

• Good flexibility and ability to make moves to other industries
• Good mix of business and engineering
• Good pay

Cons

• Higher competition
• Again, the need to deal with people problems and other non-engineering issues (not necessarily a problem for everyone)

What do you think?

I’d love to know what strategy you think you’d like to pursue. Tell me which one you’d like to pursue and how you plan on getting there using the comments section below.

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