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02.09

Engineering Career Skills Symposium

By Chris McManes

IEEE student branch leaders usually attend class, get good grades and serve as role models for fellow engineering students.

So why is it that Kosta Papasideris and Peggy Liska — leaders of the IEEE Engineering Technology Student Chapter at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas — decided not to attend a host of classes one day last October?

Did they suddenly become slackers? Did they have to rush home because mom was threatening to throw out their favorite childhood toy?

Not at all.

Papasideris and Liska skipped a combined seven classes to attend a 23 October symposium, “Engineering Career Skills for the Future: Energy in Transition.”

The event was championed by Peggy Hutcheson, chair of the IEEE-USA Employment & Career Services Committee. Dr. Joseph Morgan, a professor in Texas A&M’s Dwight Look College of Engineering, played a key organizational role.

The on-campus symposium featured other IEEE student branch members, Texas A&M professors and industry leaders. By bringing these groups together, organizers hoped to help the students discover what overall skills the energy industry is seeking and how they can find challenging, satisfying work throughout their careers. Future symposia will address other electrotechnology disciplines.

“It was somewhat of a sacrifice to miss class, but it was definitely worth it,” said Liska, who serves as the chapter’s public relations director. “I learned way more in this symposium than I probably could have learned in all four classes.

“There were a lot of inspirational speeches that really are going to reach further than just today. So I’ve got the feeling that a lot of things I would have learned in class are kind of just skills, as opposed to this is like life-altering, paradigm-shifting ideas.”

Wow, and you probably didn’t think a group of engineers sitting around talking could have a life-altering affect on someone, did you?

Mind-numbing maybe, but not paradigm-shifting.

“This is revolutionary,” said Papasideris, chapter president. “This symposium, in a manner of speaking, is gathering the troops. And I say that with emphasis on ‘troops’ because it will take legwork, it’ll take responsibility and ownership. There was a lot of passion that was shared among the group. You don’t usually hear that from engineers, but in this day and age, our backs are figuratively against the wall. We’re losing numbers in engineering and sciences, math, physics, whatever, because in my opinion, people want an easy way out. It’s been that way forever, understandably, and I’m generalizing of course, but why are we losing so many scientists and engineers?

“Well, I don’t really know the answer. Maybe no one really does, but we need to figure it out and we need to fix it. And we’re gathering troops. This is the first stage.”

The event featured a keynote address by Dr. G. Kemble Bennett, Texas A&M’s vice chancellor for engineering and dean of the College of Engineering. He told attendees that a career in engineering has never been better.

“The future is extremely bright,” Bennett said. “The engine of the economy is technology. We’re going to need engineers in the United States.”

Sharing Passion and Insight

The symposium was divided into four panels, with academic and industry leaders sharing insight into the skills required in various areas of energy production and the state of engineering education.

Speakers included, among others, Jeff Dress, president, Americas Region of TAC, Schneider Electric; Dr. Raymond Juzaitis, head of Texas A&M’s nuclear engineering department; John Hanks, National Instruments’ vice president of product marketing, data acquisition and industrial control; and Dr. Mark Holtzapple, a Texas A&M professor of chemical engineering.

Hutcheson presented ideas on interpersonal and leadership skills with Dr. Ben Zoghi, Texas A&M professor & director of the RFID Oil & Gas Solutions Group Consortium. Russ Lefevre, 2008 IEEE-USA president; and William S. Clark, a past president of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), served as moderators.

Dress, whose company will be doing work at Freedom Tower — the building going up on the World Trade Center site — said his organization hired 300 people in 2008, 75 percent engineers. They need engineers to be business leaders and have higher-level systems thinking.

Hanks, an IEEE member, told the students that National Instruments is hiring across all disciplines. They put their engineers on either a design track or business track. He spoke of engineering as an art form and tells his employees to act like journalists and talk to as many people in the company as possible. That way they learn about different people’s jobs and find out what’s going on.

Ethics is valued at National Instruments.

“Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s right,” Hanks said.

Papasideris, who’s majoring in electronics engineering technology and physics, said he gained special insight from Hanks’ presentation.

“He said that engineering is music or art,” Papasideris said. “He specifically mentioned music at one point and I’m a musician. Across the spectrum, when you hear that, science does not equate to art and engineering doesn’t either. But for someone in industry to say that means that he’s got a passion that was developed over time. I asked him afterwards when that moment of clarity hit him. He said it was after school, and that was very intriguing because I never thought about it that way.

“I never thought that I would fall in love with engineering after I became an engineer.”

Papasideris added that Hanks’ presentation and his conversation with him afterwards reaffirmed his career choice and provided him with a refreshing moment of clarity.

“I’ve been looking for the passion and I didn’t expect to see it in this field,” he said. “I expected to see passion come eventually, but it was nice to hear because we don’t speak about it in those terms.”

Liska, an electronics engineering major, appreciated hearing from industry leaders.

“I liked the fact that they weren’t just industry representatives. Most of them were CEOs, vice presidents or presidents of companies and that carries greater weight than just industry representatives,” she said. “Hearing from the people who make the direction-changing decisions for companies — what technologies to invest in and which things to actually devote their time to — made a much bigger impression.”

The industry panelists’ primary message to the students was that in addition to the technical know-how that any engineer must possess, an understanding of business principles and the ability to communicate effectively are key skills for career success.

Richard M. Scruggs, who at the time of the symposium was the director of Texas A&M’s Center for New Ventures and Entrepreneurship, is now CEO of Salient Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Trained as a chemical engineer, he suggested that the students:

• Learn a foreign language

• Embrace courses outside their discipline

• Improve their writing, speaking, leadership and persuasion skills

• Look for courses that require teamwork

• Learn project management and sales

• Take a few business classes

• Pursue internships

• Travel across cultures

When weighing career options, Scruggs, who has a daughter majoring in biochemical engineering at Texas A&M, told the students to be open to a new location; consider careers in alternative energy; think services as well as products; and make sure they add value to their organization.

“When you add value, your job can’t be outsourced,” he said.

Engineering at Texas A&M

Texas A&M, which has nearly 9,000 students in its engineering college [http://engineering.tamu.edu/], ranks among the top five U.S. universities in producing undergraduate engineering degrees. Engineering technology students take the same basic science and math courses as engineering students. The difference is that engineering technology courses emphasize application and testing more than theory. Every lecture course has lab work with it.

In other words, engineering technology students get their hands a little dirtier, an aspect Papasideris finds appealing.

“You see theoretical values, you do the pencil work, and you match those theoretical values,” he said. “You expect the schematic, the theory and the bench — which is the real stuff — to match the two theories, but they don’t. So what happens then? Our department is very good at that application-level study.

“And that’s one of the reasons we choose this department. Our professors and our faculty are what keeps us here.”

Papasideris said one of the best courses he took was in project management.

“The point of the class is not only to get you ready for whatever career path you might take as a manager, but to get you speaking in front of people,” he said. “It’s better than any communications course the university can offer.”

Engineers who serve as project leaders have to communicate effectively with their team members, their superiors and their clients.

“Engineers need to be able to communicate their technical abilities to people that normally or maybe never are exposed to it,” Papasideris said. “Past [Texas A&M] graduates make it a point to come back and say, ‘you need to know how to communicate with people and you need to be able to get over fears of public speaking.

“You need to be precise and accurate and technical at the same time.’”

Improving Communications Skills on the Job

Hanks said National Instruments is not as concerned about a prospective employee’s communication skills when they’re hired. It believes it can foster those abilities.

“I think our company culture is an oral culture,” he said. “So speaking, being able to stand up and state clearly what your points are, [doing] it in a humorous way, [doing] it where people come on to your side is built into our culture. It’s like you join the tribe and then everybody is a great speaker. So that’s what I meant by teaching [communication skills], that we have enough built into our culture, where we have projects where they have to finalize and present their presentation like a dissertation. We have formal and informal [opportunities]; we have Toastmasters organizations. We are rewarded to be keynote speakers at conferences. We have our own conference that has 3,500 people come to it [with] five huge-screen TVs and it is an honor to be a spokesman who gets up to speak at those events. We have 140 technical sessions and it’s an honor to speak at those, too.

“It’s just built in to everything that we do. And by the time that you’ve been there three years, you’re pretty darn good.”

Hanks was not saying that universities should not develop communication skills in their students, but that it’s not their primary mission.

“It’s a subtle point,” he said. “My point is the charter of the university is to create technical people, engineers that have depth and breadth. And they need to do that first. If somebody wants to invest in communications and is a great writer [or] another type of communications, that’s good, but I’m looking to the university, the engineering school to provide technically competent people first.

“If we get too worried on the communications stuff, then we’re taking away from their first principal, and that’s really my point.”

Persuading and Negotiating

No matter how good your ideas are, if you can’t convey them effectively to others, they likely won’t see the light of day.

“You have to have that technical knowledge and background, but it’s your people skills, your ability to communicate, that moves you through life successfully,” Bennett said. “You’ve got to be technically solid and you’ve got to present well.”

Scruggs discussed the power of persuasion, i.e., the use of communications skills to convince someone of something. He used an example of a recent engineering graduate working in a first job.

“When your boss tells you to analyze a problem and you come up with a solution that’s going to require time or money or personnel or equipment to do it, you have to persuade him that you’ve done the right research, [that] you’ve got an idea that makes sense,” Scruggs said. “In fact, your boss may have had a preconceived notion that was different. So you’ve got to convince him or her that this is the right way to go. That means that you’ve got to have the ability to articulate your idea. That might be in pictures, that might be in words, that might be standing up in front of a group of people and saying, ‘I looked at this problem, this is my research, these are the facts that I gathered, and based on those facts, these are my four recommendations.’

“You’ve got to be able to do that because if you can’t communicate it, they can’t agree to it.”

Persuasion often gives way to negotiation. “It’s my way or the highway” is not the road to take. Learning how to give up some things to get others — compromising — is a valuable skill. Few negotiators get everything they want. The key is to reach a point where everyone can live with and support the outcome of the negotiation. You should try to reach consensus; unanimity is far more elusive.

“You have to manage your emotions and put your position aside and look to your interest and negotiate your interest to a third alternative,” said Dr. Raymond Juzaitis, head of Texas A&M’s nuclear engineering department. “It may not be my way or your way, it could be the third, creative way.

“And I think that is a skill, actually, that can be taught. That’s something that I think, in a bag of tricks that you take with you from your university, is very useful in a productive life.”

Interacting with One Another

The symposium’s largest session featured four representatives from academia and four from industry. Entitled, “How Can They Work Together to Identify and Develop Future Green Technology Skills and Careers,” students were encouraged to share their experiences and ask questions.

Texas A&M’s Juzaitis pointed out that the “third leg of our national mission,” besides academia and industry is government, “but as we heard at lunch, the government is dropping the ball.” He added that “R&D money is the fuel of the academic process.”

Dress said 60 percent of the engineers at his company, TAC, Schneider Electric, have less than five years experience. “If your business isn’t growing, it’s hard to attract top talent,” he said.

Mauro Togneri, who helped start the IEEE-USA Entrepreneur’s Village and Innovation Institute, was in the audience. An Italian by birth, he said that Italy and Germany lost most of their engineers during World War II. Thus, his education taught him to use technology to improve society.

The idea of improving quality of life and giving back to the community reverberated with the students. Liska appreciated the chance to interact with the presenters.

“This was a neat opportunity to get feedback and to give our opinions and impressions of what’s going on and actually feel like you’re making a difference, which strikes a chord with our generation because we do want to give back,” said Liska, who’s interested in either an engineering career or becoming a math or science teacher. “And that was mentioned multiple times in the symposium.”

Papasideris agreed that a career as an engineer is about more than a good income.

“It’s not just about making money,” he said. It’s also about friendship, fun, impact.”

Beyond developing a technical area of expertise and possessing strong interpersonal skills and qualities, Liska identified another critical component to career success.

“I think the way you set yourself apart,” she said, “is by having a personality, by having uniqueness about you that people really admire and can respect you for.”

Chris McManes is IEEE-USA's public relations manager. Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.

Opinions expressed are the author's.