How can you increase your visibility and advance your career in Engineering Management?

To increasing visibility follow these main rules ▪️ Vision: Have a clear vision of what you want to achieve. ▪️ Contribution: Understand how you can contribute to your organization and field. ▪️ Goals: Define your short-term and long-term career goals. ▪️ Strengths & Improvements: Identify your strengths and areas for improvement. ▪️ Problem Solving: Recognize the problems you can solve and opportunities you can create. ▪️ Impact & Success: Determine how you measure your impact and success. ▪️ Alignment: Align your actions with your aspirations and communicate your value to others.

The first step is to increase your self awareness. You have to know: -what your values are. -what you enjoy doing. -what you are known to be good at. -your character strengths and weaknesses. Take character and profile tests to learn more about yourself. Seek constructive feedback from others. You then identify what kind of engineering management role you are seeking. Define the gap between now and your future self who fits that role profile. This should be in terms of skills and experiences you need to enable you to fit the new role. Next you define the actions you need to undertake to gain these skills and experiences. Your plan has to be achievable and with timelines. Regularly measure against those actions to assess your progress.

Share your knowledge by creating high-quality content that provides value to your audience. This could be in the form of blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, or social media posts. Ensure your content is informative, engaging, and showcases your expertise

▪️ Personal Brand: Create and maintain a consistent and professional personal brand reflecting your skills, expertise, personality, and values. ▪️ Online Presence: Showcase your personal brand through various platforms and channels. ▪️ Website/Blog: Create a personal website or blog to share insights on engineering topics. ▪️ Online Communities: Participate in online communities related to your field and niche, engage with other members, answer questions, share resources, and provide feedback. ▪️ Publish Content: Publish articles, podcasts, videos, or webinars on relevant platforms to demonstrate your thought leadership.

You can progress internally, or through changing employers. How you are known and what you are known for will play the biggest role when being considered for internal promotions. If it is a new appointment with another employer then your CV and online presence will play a bigger role. Make sure you have a relatable story that people could connect emotionally with. I write about this all the time in my newsletter. Your personal story and brand should include figures and facts about your achievements and challenges you overcame in the past. Invest time, effort and even money in learning how to craft a good CV and LinkedIn profile. If you don't have the time, then pay someone to do it for you.

▪️ Seek Feedback: Ask for regular and constructive feedback from peers, managers, and stakeholders to identify strengths, weaknesses, and set improvement goals. ▪️ Find a Mentor: Find a mentor or coach with the skills and experience you aspire to have for guidance, challenges, and career development support. ▪️ Be a Mentor: Be a mentor or coach to someone else to share your knowledge and advice while developing your leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills. ▪️ Expand Network: Seek feedback and mentorship to expand your network and exposure, and increase your credibility and reputation.

Find someone who achieved what you want to achieve or is a couple of steps ahead of you and seek their advice. Find a few people who will be honest and give you constructive feedback. For example your manager, your peers from other departments, other relevant personnel. If you find a mentor ask them the relevant questions, not the superficial stuff. You have to be careful whom do you ask for feedback as some people's feedback might be irrelevant and coming from an emotional corner. Regardless, any piece of advice you get is someone's opinion and know that this is their thoughts not the ultimate reality, so try to look at it with an unemotional perspective and devise the actions you need to take from them to be able to move forward.

Focus on strategic projects. Seek out opportunities to lead or contribute to high-profile projects that align with company goals. This showcases your skills and leadership potential to a wider audience. Sometimes, it's difficult to find such projects, but they bring the most value to your career development. Bonus option if you can find company or department wide project that aligns with your personal goal (like learning new skills). By actively contributing, you increase your visibility and build valuable relationships with key decision-makers. Demonstrate your impact. Find opportunities to lead and influence others.

Volunteering is like free training. There is no excuse for you to not take it. One thing people miss out on, the fact that volunteering adds a lot to your experience and your character, despite them not knowing this from the outset. So people underestimate the importance of volunteering, the truth is, people grow the most when engaging in activities with others. Seek volunteering activities within your community. Leadership thrives in these situations. The more you do it the more it comes naturally to you. Similarly, you need to be open for helping roles within your organisation, as it is one of the best things you could do to increase your experience and elevate your personal brand.

Building your personal brand is important, but I believe that you also need to build and invest in your team's personal brand. Because your performance and effectiveness are often evaluated by your team's performance.

▪️ Continuous Learning: Stay updated with the latest trends, technologies, and best practices in your field. ▪️ Networking: Attend industry events, webinars, and workshops to connect with professionals and experts. ▪️ Certifications: Pursue relevant certifications to enhance your skills and credibility. ▪️ Work-Life Balance: Maintain a healthy work-life balance to prevent burnout and sustain productivity. ▪️ Ethics: Uphold professional ethics and integrity in all your actions. ▪️ Diversity & Inclusion: Promote and respect diversity and inclusion in your team and workplace. ▪️ Adaptability: Be open to change and adapt to new situations and challenges.

- Continuous Learning - Networking - Leadership Opportunities: Seek roles/projects to showcase managerial skills. - Mentorship: Find mentors for guidance and advice. - Certifications: Obtain relevant certifications to validate expertise. - Effective Communication: Develop strong communication skills. - Project Success: Deliver successful projects to showcase management abilities. - Industry Involvement: Participate in events and conferences. - Cross-functional Collaboration: Collaborate with different departments. - Results-oriented Approach: Focus on achieving tangible results. - Visibility: Promote achievements through internal and external channels.

Programming Joke: It doesn't matter what you know, even if you're a junior, buy a microphone, buy a Mac and record a video stream on YouTube. You are already popular :)

The projects that helped my career growth the most are the ones that others felt sceptical about. Every time you progress you make tons of new connections and friends, occasionally you get unfriended by a few. You have to accept this as part of life and not blame yourself. Be kind to yourself and others. Leadership is more of a journey than a position and you need people to be on your side along the way. As a leader, you are not perfect. You are as human as everyone else. Don't expect otherwise and never act otherwise.