Things Nobody Told Me

I became an electrical engineer in 1966, after having been a ham radio operator at age 16, in 1957. I soon learned that designing radios as a profession was way different than doing it for fun. That was probably the first thing nobody told me about my new career.

The second thing I learned was that I had been taught to do circuit analysis but nothing about design. Later I learned that the reason for this was that none of my professors ever worked in the real world so none of them knew anything practical. On top of that, transistors were pretty new, so they were trying to learn about them at the same time we students were learning both transistor and vacuum tube technology.

The real shock came when I realized that I had to supervise technicians and other engineers. As a scientist told me many years later, "When I was working on my doctorate, nobody told me I would have to supervise other people. I have no clue what I'm doing." I totally understand that.

You may have heard of the Peter Principle, which says that people eventually rise to their level of incompetence in an organization. For engineers and other technologists, this usually means that we become managers, which requires a different set of skills than those we were taught in school. We need skills in dealing with people, and the principles that govern human behavior are not quite as specific as Ohm's Law or F = ma from physics. 

The biggest sin of organizations is, however, assuming that if you are good at your engineering work you will be a good supervisor. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, there is an almost inverse relationship between excellent engineering skills and good people skills. To use an old saying, You can take the engineer out of the lab, but you can't take the lab out of the engineer. 

Don't get me wrong. I loved being an engineer, and I love dealing with engineers. Over the past 40 years, I have had thousands of engineers in my seminars, and they actually respond well to psychology when it is taught by a fellow engineer, because they know that I understand how they think and the problems they have.

Now, after all these years, my partner (also an engineer--chemical engineering) and I have developed a certificate program just for engineers who need to develop skills in leadership and management. It's called the Engineering Management Master's Certificate, and it is, we think, the best thing going since somebody learned how to make semiconductors. 

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