EngineerHer

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I didn’t enter the engineering sphere with any further thoughts than a) I like maths, physics and tech drawing and b) there’ll be a job at the end of it. There were no notions of a structured career path or even the vaguest hint of a plan.

So it should come as no surprise that when people ask me in an interview “why did you move here” or “it sounds like you really enjoyed your time here, why did you leave”, I have to think carefully. Because answers like “it sounded interesting” or ” I dunno really, it just felt right” don’t really work in a job interview.

Instead you have to retcon a few things.

It gets even worse when they ask you why you decided to develop a particular skill. It’s almost never a carefully thought out move. It is almost always because

• The company got some new software and you were most interested in learning how to use it
• Someone needed help in that area
• There was a project that looked interesting
• Someone left, you were semi-adjacent to the work they did, so you picked up the rest
• You were thrown into a meeting at the last minute and then had to pick things up. Fast.

(For those reading this and thinking life in industry appears to be very chaotic at times – no comment. )

How careers drift

It’s not quite as bad as a boat drifting freely across the ocean. But very often, careers evolve in very different directions because of apparently minor choices. People who started in the exact same spot, with the exact same qualifications, can end up in very different places after 15 years of choices.

So let’s think about this for a bit then. Some of the reasons we make decisions have to do with work – particularly earlier in our careers. We’re more mobile, we’re more agile, we’re more prepared to put work ahead of everything else in life.

Before I got married, moving to a new location for the right job was a no brainer. It was only me, I generally rented, and honestly, myself and Dad got really good at packing up a 7.5tonne van…. After I got married and had to consider Al, it required a few seconds more thinking. And I’ve had to pass up on opportunities because of that.

But mostly, how my career has drifted, is because I see something that interested me and I pursued it. It’s even easier these days with free online courses being so readily available. I’m currently teaching myself Python (my college lecturers would have heart attacks at letting me near code again, but it’s much easier when I can see the use for it in real life. I swear. Also, Fortran was awful!!)

But then, we get good at something and we tend to want to stick to it. So we keep doing it. And then someone says, “Hey can you help out with this?” And of course, we say yes, because it makes sense. And then there’s another, and another, and another, and suddenly you find yourself with a completely blocked out diary, and no control over anything in your work any more.

And worse – you look around and realise you’re not doing the work you love any more. Somewhere along the way you drifted away from the work that feeds you (see last week) and because you’ve reached a certain seniority or a certain level of comfort, you just keep on keeping on.

The hidden costs of being too useful

I have known many colleagues over the years who have become far too useful to everyone around them. You know the type:

• They go on holiday and the entire site panics
• They have to hide somewhere to get any work of their own done
• On any given day, there are at least 5 people in a queue to get their help, their opinion, their signature, whatever
• They forget to put an out of office on and the entire site nearly shuts down
• Everyone always talks about how bad it would be if they left… until they do

And it’s possible you are this type as well. Once you start hearing the phrase “well we can’t make this decision without X” you know you’re in trouble.

And I say this as someone who refuses to allow certain decisions to be made without me! But these days, I choose what those decisions are, rather than letting them be chosen for me.

What happens then is that this poor woman is far too busy to try something new. To attend a training course. God forbid they want to try a stretch project or development role!

Getting to this position can be awkward, stifling and painful. On the one hand, you don’t want to let people down. On the other, surely there must be someone else somewhere on the goddamn plant that can sign this particular form? You don’t even mind training them, but you don’t even have headspace to find them, to figure out who else could take some of this on.

And so you end up stuck.

What do you actually want?

Very often we get stuck in an old story for ourselves. We get caught in the work we needed and wanted 10, 15, 20 years ago. But as I said above, we have changed. As people and as engineers.

I am certainly not the same person I was at 40, never mind 30 or 20. What good looked like then is very different to what it looks like now. So it’s worth examining what you really want. If you had free choice with no restrictions, what projects would you volunteer for? What would you avoid like the plague? What would you never volunteer for again? (Whether it was volunteer or voluntold!)

Fundamentally, what does success look like for you now? Not you at 22. You now, after all the life that’s happened.

For most of my life, leaving work abruptly was never an issue for me. A) I had no one really I needed to leave work for and B) even if I did, I just wasn’t important enough for anyone to care (beyond, y’know being worried about me)

These days though, with a husband with various physical and mental issues, there are times I need to just go. A while ago, he fell and hit his head. (“A while” here could mean yesterday or 2 years ago!) That meant me walking out of work, getting him to the right consultant in the hospital, getting through the required conversations about whether he did or didn’t need to stay overnight, and then arranging the follow up the following day with the uber-consultant. Don’t get me wrong, he’s grand and this doesn’t happen too often any more, but I need to be there when it does.

Anyone with kids know exactly what I mean.

So that ability, to be able to work asynchronously, even for a few days, is vital in any role I take now, in a way it wasn’t 20 years ago.

Equally, my money requirements are far more diverse and higher than they used to be. Pensions, health insurance, shares, etc feature far more in conversations the older I get. Because they are important. They weren’t to 22yrs old me.

So it might be worth sitting down and getting very clear on what it is you want.

A bit of a thought experiment.

Let’s work this through. Imagine you had no other expectations than your own.

No dependants. Your manager and team have zero opinion, wants, or needs. The company, in some drug fuelled haze, has decided you get open choice to do anything. Society doesn’t matter any more – they have no say.

Nothing and no one has any weight on your activities, other than you.

With all that in mind, what would you spend your days and weeks doing?

Would you still work? How many hours? What would you really want to do? Where would you do it? How would you do it?

I’m not just talking work here. For me there would be a lot of reading, learning, cooking etc thrown in. And the 40 hour work week would be long gone. But I’m not sharing my own dreams with you – let’s hear yours.

No responsibilities, no nothing. You can spend your time as you wish. What would that look like?

Then write that down. That’s the dream.

It might not be realistic right now. That’s grand. No real major change ever seemed realistic at the start. But as a good engineer – you’ve identified the want. This is the URS. The template.

But maybe you don’t need a dramatic change?

Maybe for the most part, you’re happy enough with the life you live. But there are some niggles that you want to change. Or you know the life you want is too big a step right now, but you can see one thing you can change.

It could be as simple as the request to change a meeting time, as I discussed last week. But it starts with noticing which parts of your career are yours, and which bits are hangovers from an earlier you, or a mistake that needs to be corrected, or a plan that belongs to someone else.

You only get one life, why live someone else’s dream?

As always, feel free to pop a meeting in my diary if you fancy a chat about this. But try the thought experiment. You might be really surprised by what you find!