GOAL OF AN ENGINEER

Did you ever take the time to stop and think, “What is my ultimate career goal?” It’s an open-ended question with tons of possible answers, but it will certainly force you to think about your career and where you are headed. Here are your three steps for setting big picture goals that will ensure you stay engaged and fulfilled, both at your engineering job and at home.

Step 1 – Describe Your Ultimate Engineering Career Goal

Take some time to think about the most important thing you want to accomplish in your engineering career. Some questions you can ask yourself to help determine your ultimate career goal might include:

In 30 years from now, if I were to say “I am really glad I accomplished XYZ in my career,” what would XYZ be?

Why do I want to be an engineer?

How does my engineering job help me contribute to the improvement of the world/environment, and does that matter to me?

If I could only do one task or have one key role in my engineering career, what would it be?

If someone came up to me and said they would give me $100,000 a year to do any job, but the person would select the job for me from a list of three jobs I gave them, would my current job be one of the three? If not, why not? If so, why?

Answering one or all of these questions should help you create a sentence or two describing your ultimate engineering career goal.

Step 2 – Describe Your Ultimate Personal Goal (Not Related to Your Engineering Career)

Take the time to think about and describe the ultimate goal that you want to achieve in life outside of your career. Here are some guidelines for doing this:

Ask questions similar to those outlined in Step 1 above, but more geared towards your personal/family life.

Your ultimate personal goal shouldn’t be to climb Mount Everest, or visit the Great Wall of China; instead, think of WHY you want to do those things, or what doing those things would bring you in your life. 

Don’t think that there is only one thing or action that can bring you your ultimate goal. For example, if you think your ultimate goal is to climb Mount Everest, instead maybe your goal is to simply do things that you never thought you could do. This mentality makes achieving your goals much more feasible on a daily basis. Maybe you can’t climb Mount Everest every day, but you can certainly push your limits every day in other ways.

Step 3 – Describe Your Ultimate Goal

This step is where you combine your career and personal goals into one overall goal. This is a statement describing what your underlying goal or vision is for what you do every day—for every action you take. You could almost think of this as your vision or definition of success. If someone were to ask you how you define success, you could give them the statement you describe here in Step 3.

Investigate your knowledge portfolio

I use the technique called knowledge portfolio management to know exactly what I know and don't know. Likea financial portfolio, it is important to constantly and regularly investigate how you're doing in terms of your knowledge.

Learn the operations on your knowledge portfolio.

An easy way to think about your knowledge portfolio goes like this. Your knowledge portfolio can be partitioned into five subsets.

Things that you don't know anything about.

Things that you are familiar with but are not comfortable with.

Things that you are comfortable with.

Things that you were once comfortable with but have sort of forgotten.

Things that you have a complete mastery with and will never forget.

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Finally,

I'll say it again, your goal and your current state are like two sides of a coin. The more you know your current state, the easier for you to set your goal. The more you know your current state, the easier for you to know exactly how much you've improved, which helps you stay on track with your goal.