You are emerging from your studies and found a nice position as a new engineer at a firm of your liking. The money compared to broke student life is great. Hopefully you are saving some. There’s excitement about the new phase. You finally have a chance to exercise your talents without being evaluated (or so you think, but that is a different topic). Yet it feels like you have been assigned to projects where you are not a fit. That do not play to your strengths. That are not what you envisioned before being hired.
Are you stuck in the wrong track? What should you do and when?
This is a reasonable and common question from new engineers. While everyone’s situation is different, there are a few general principles you may find useful.
Applicability for New Engineers
If every day is rainbows and bunnies, great, no need for this post. Nor is this discussion about situations where you find yourself immediately in a bad situation. Hostile environments, companies working on projects completely against your principles, unsustainable commutes, etc. Get out now; life’s too short.
Rather, what if you are in that middle, tepid ground. You’ve hired on thinking that the company and your strengths would be complementary fits. But you expected to be spending more time in the field, and you’re at a desk. You have a strong turbomachinery background but instead of wind projects you’re working on solar. You feel in a flow state working on computational fluid dynamics or electrical network studies but are doing piping support or raceway design. The tasks are ok but do not feel like your calling.
Will you be doing this forever? How do you raise your hand and find different opportunities within the company? Or elsewhere? When should you do this?
An Alarming Lack of Omniscience
Recognize several things as you step into a new company and start working on initial tasks and training. Especially if it does not feel like a match made in Heaven on Day 1:
Acquire Knowledge: Your book learning will likely not have prepared you for the full range of design tasks or roles for varied technologies. At the outset you will not know what you have an aptitude or appetite for or not. Now is your chance to experiment and sample different tracks. Larger companies have defined rotation programs where you almost certainly will find roles you want to avoid. At smaller companies rotations are necessarily less formal. If you find some tasks you are terrible at, that is not time wasted, but rather valuable data points. Water cooler conversations may allow you to find some opportunities at the firm that you are not working on currently, but might gravitate towards eventually. Observe. Collect intelligence.
Expectations: Few engineering firms should reasonably expect fresh new graduates to be able to contribute at a high capacity factor until a good 6-12 months into their role. Showing up on time, yes. Listening and learning, yes. Some production and making mistakes, certainly. Forming relationships with people and understanding roles, relationships and processes in the firm, yes. Being the firm’s expert in a specific track: doubtful. There is no need to be anxious about feeling lost in an unfamiliar field. Use it as a proving ground to demonstrate how fast you can pick up new concepts.
Stressor Staging: Consider that you are facing many stressors at the same time. Shifting from school to this employment. Possible relocation for you & perhaps a partner. Transition from a “senior” position at one institution where you knew the ropes to a very “junior” position at your new organization. Let’s not pack on another stressor (anxiety over track/role) in until some of the transitional stresses, which might be coloring your perspective, have abated
Lack of Omniscience: It may be shocking, but your supervisors and colleagues have an appalling lack of knowledge regarding your true strengths, motivations and objectives. Part of that reason is that you may not know them yourself. This is a time of learning for them as well, so be patient and provide them with data and feedback that will allow them to find the best opportunities for you. I know many examples of young engineers that worked obscurely for years at minor tasks until they and other senior engineers (including myself) discovered their true strengths and preferences, at which time their careers took off like rockets. That time in the wilderness took a couple years. Be patient with yourself.
Applicable Skills: You may not be working precisely in your preferred field or role now, but that at minimum is providing you a broader background about industry and common tasks & problems that will make you a better multidisciplinary engineer or manager as you advance. And/or it will broaden your skill set to make you more valuable & flexible, if you do need to jump ship. Rarely is it lost time, and most project skills are very transferable to other sectors. Knowing several young engineers that can hop and excel between fossil, geothermal, hydro, wind, solar PV, solar thermal or other projects, I can safely say that there is little risk of a good engineer being “pigeonholed” in a particular non-favorite technology, if you are intelligent and adaptable.
Right Actions
Life is short, so one wants to find a fine balance between proactivity and patience to sort these issues out. During these first months you are collecting intelligence, exhibiting some of your strengths, discovering some of your weaknesses. You are having beverages with coworkers and learning more about their projects. Show some interest in their tasks that might appeal to you. You volunteer some help and get some informal exposure to other tracks. You figure out the networks of those that win and allocate projects – the rainmakers – and those that could serve as useful mentor/advocates for new engineers, formally or informally.
For the first six months “You know nothing, Jon Snow.” Accept this and set a high bar for learning and lower bar for production. Anxiety that will dim your performance and persona will be mitigated. Be humble, or if you aren’t humble, at least fake it. Perhaps some will stick and make you a nicer person.
Typically one of your first and best formal opportunities to try to “jump tracks” and find new opportunities, flex your other capabilities, will be at your periodic performance review. Due to the aforementioned lack of omniscience, performance reviews are rarely an accurate accounting of your actual strengths and accomplishments. It is entirely possible in a matrix organization common to engineering companies that your reviewer has little idea what you did during that period.
Rather, think of this like your annual physical. The review can be more about you putting some self-diagnosed issues on the table and positing some potential solutions. Then with that feedback, you and a good specialist can collaborate to come up with appropriate strategies. As you are responsible for your own health, you’ll need to be the one primarily responsible for your own career arc. Or the converse, but the results can be rather dismal.
Summary
To be more precise, for a new engineer there would be somewhere between at least six months and perhaps two years to learn enough to characterize and improve a mediocre setting. If you can tune your career arc better to your liking and stay at the company, that is a fine outcome. If things go terribly awry and it is time to seek opportunities elsewhere, you will still have learned a lot, made some money, built your CV and not given up too much in terms of opportunity cost if you make a change around that time frame or longer. Do learn, build your network, make good use of your formal reviews and the best of your time there, and that experience will serve as a solid launching pad for the next phase of your productivity.
In short, be patient and kind with yourself in the early going. Things will work out.
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