"Engineering Management Thought of the Week" Jeff Glass

Happy New Year! For my post this month, I want to discuss the top 5 misperceptions that I think our Engineering Management Students have when they first start in the program and even when they graduate and begin their careers. Engineering managers who are very early in their careers may also find this of interest as they probably have some of the same misperceptions. Interestingly, when I talk with alumni who have been out for a few years, these misperceptions have generally evaporated. This is one reason we struggle with parts of the MEM curriculum; our data shows that they are needed based on feedback from our Industrial Advisory Board and Alumni but as a student, it is hard to understand why (and I felt the same way when I was a student!). Thus, for some courses and activities, we simply need to say “trust us” – in five years you are likely to agree that it was a good idea to spend time on this while in the MEM Program. So here they are:

Misperception #1: I do not need a course in Intellectual Property and Business Law because I am going into [fill in the blank: banking, IT, architecture, etc.] – Every year students ask if they can be relieved from attending the core course involving Intellectual Property, Business Law and Entrepreneurship. The argument generally centers around the fact they will never need to understand patents or intellectual property because their career paths diverge from such mundane matters. Please reconsider! Think about it – the most durable competitive advantage that any company has in today’s global economy is their knowledge. You should be familiar with the common phrase that “We now work in a knowledge economy.” Intellectual Property is simply another way to say a firm’s knowledge! You are just as likely to need intellectual property and business law as you are to need marketing and finance fundamentals. It is part of the general understanding of what creates competitive advantage in businesses. To understand how firms create value it is critical for you to understand intellectual property, including but not limited to, patents. I mentioned, banking, IT and architecture above as examples because I have spoken with alumni in all three of those areas within the last year who have told me that they thought the Intellectual Property and Business Law course was going to be the least useful course they took and in reality, it turned out to be one of the most useful. It is probably clear how important this topic is if you are developing new products but consider the following. If you are a business analyst trying to evaluate the value of a firm, how will you determine the value of its processes and know-how without understanding what type of intellectual property it holds and how it has protected it? Or if you are a consultant trying to advise a company on how it should improve its position in the market or enhance its operations, doesn’t that require a basic knowledge about how to assess value of its true competitive advantage; i.e., its intellectual property? This may not be the most glamorous course you will take but it’s important; trust me!

Misperception #2: We do too much networking – I can empathize with students who feel this way because it does not necessarily come naturally and it is not like an engineering or science course where you learn a set of equations or concepts and then you do some assignments and get tested on them. On the other hand, too many people excel in their area of study or expertise but never really grasp the importance of the relationships that they will need throughout their careers. They feel; If I do a good job I will get noticed and just rewards will come to me naturally. I wish it were so. In reality, it is not even logical to think that is the way it works. What I mean is; why should we think that relationships take a back seat to competence? Trusting those you work with and believing they will do a good job in the future when you hire them for a particular job or ask them to join an important project can only be judged based on the relationship you have with them. On paper they may have all the skills in the world but if they can’t work with others on the team or if they alienate themselves from the rest of the organization, it does not generally matter how smart or competent they are in their field.

Misperception #3: The career center will get me a job when I graduate – If we could all have a job placement specialist follow us throughout our career and make sure we were doing the right things to find our next position, then it might be best to simply hire a placement officer in our career center and ask them to put you in a new job upon graduation. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately in many ways, you will likely change jobs every 3 to 5 years and even organizations in many cases, and there will not be someone there to hold our hand through those changes. We are all responsible for those changes ourselves so it is MUCH more effective for your long term career if we teach you the skills you need to manage your career and find your next position rather than spending our time just trying to place you in a job. The career center does great work and is more focused on specific job opportunities than many other programs I am aware of but it is the student’s responsibility to learn the skills, and make the significant effort, needed to find a job. It is an important life-long skill.

Misperception #4: I performed better than my team said I did so I should get a higher grade – Teamwork is hard. And companies continue to tell us that there is no such thing as too much team training. I was ready to dial back the team training a couple of years ago until our Industrial Advisory Board gave us a strong and unified argument (from their personal experiences with students) in favor of more, not less, team training. The thing students dislike the most is the team grading. Every year we hear, “I worked very hard and contributed a lot to the team so the score they gave me is not fair.” In reality, you probably need to develop your self-awareness and awareness of others (i.e., Emotional Intelligence). Your contributions probably were not of the quality you think they were. But actually that does not matter. The most valuable thing about your team grade is that it tells you how your team perceived your contribution. Thus, the team score is, more or less by definition, correct. It is how they perceived your contribution. If you make an exceptional individual contribution to the tasks you are assigned in a team at your company but simultaneously disenfranchise, distract, or otherwise derail the other members, do you expect to be rewarded? I hope not! From the perspective of the organization, your net contribution is negative in that case. Call it what you will (politics, subjectivity, favoritism), organizations are about people and people are about relationships and relationships are about feelings and emotions so you need to start paying attention to how you are perceived as much as about how you think you contributed.

Misperception #5: The MEM program spends too much time teaching me writing skills – I will keep this short because I have already written an entire post about it: https://jtglass.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/the-importance-of-the-written-word/. Writing skills are nearly as important as presentation skills. Quite often students think that we mean spelling and vocabulary when we say writing but we actually mean much more. Please see my previous post but in short, it is all about communicating effectively, which means that flow, conciseness, knowing the audience, etc. are all important parts of the quality of your writing. Even those of you who write constantly can improve through continued structured writing activities. It is like the layers in an onion. As you improve you can understand the more subtle points and develop a style that changes with your goal and your audience. In many situations, how you write will determine how you are perceived by your peers and your supervisors – make it an asset not a liability.