My ideal engineering leader is certainly somebody that's got the
engineering background to understand what's going on within their particular
area of focus but there's also the leadership skills that are required in
order to make that person work better with teams so whether they're an
individual contributor and taking on a leadership role within that team or
whether they're a direct manager with a team of people, they need to have the
skills to be able to get those folks to want to follow the path or strategy that
that engineering leader is taken. And so the person needs to have those skill sets
in order to do that. Otherwise you get where nobody wants to follow you where you're going.
You know leadership is important so you think of individuals that can
communicate well, have a sense of purpose and understand the mission and can stay focused
that are candid because a lot of it is trust in order to be
a leader, your team has to trust you but also have the idea that
you will lead them in the right direction
so capability is another key attribute of a leader
I think some of the soft skills that an engineering leader needs to
complement their technical skills are items like interpersonal relationships,
communication skills, very very important aspects of working together if you're
trying to articulate something to somebody and it's in a way that maybe
they're not comprehending then you're really not communicating very well and
in today's environment communication is I think one of the most more important skills.
At the end usually it settles down to something that sounds kind of superficial but it's
not. It'll be a comment at the end something like, I just like him or I like her and what
they mean by that is can I work next to this person. When this person gets put
onto my team or if I'm gonna be on this person's team, is that team more
functional or more dysfunctional because of them and that really goes into all those
skills that you're talking about where comes to communication, where it comes to
being able to have legitimate conflict with someone and not not let it get
personal, keep it professional, all these various things that that really don't
come from an area of technical expertise
I believe in the business community today there's a lot of collaboration you
know even in the the engineering arena. In order for that to foster and be
successful it's important you know that engineers have that good technical
background. I believe that's a cornerstone but with that collaboration is a
need for leadership, you know, someone that understands the the overall purpose
of the project and can help lead the team in that direction. So leadership you
know is a key element of success i believe the two attributes of technical
capability you know and those leadership attributes are key elements of success.
Engineering is by its very nature an environment where we continue to try and
progress things that are there today to something better and so innovation is
extremely important and whether you work for a big company or small company in
order to innovate keeps you moving forward as a company longevity and so I
think a lot of people see innovation at small companies but at very large
companies it's extremely important as well
I believe for one thing it's it's a tiebreaker
you know there are many people that come with you know the technical skills you
know but if you can expand that you know with the idea of application, innovation,
so that you can bring your technical know-how to create useful products
that's important for business. And so that's really what separates you
know leaders from others, the ability to merge those ideas for a good business venture
So the ELD program here at Penn State helps students to enhance and progress
their careers because it's an environment where it's not a requirement
to take just to get an engineering degree but it's something that people
elect to go ahead and take. And so as a company we're looking for people that
want to take on extra work within their environments everyone has a job that
they do within their normal day but there's a lot of ancillary things that
need to happen in order to keep a company moving forward and so when we're looking to
hire people were looking for people who have worked in many different activities
who have taken on extra work
not again as a requirement but as something that they wanted to do to to
improve themselves.
I would say a level of maturity and a level of perspective that you're not going to get
just strictly focused on the technical work. You want to learn about things like
management, management problems, if nothing else even if you're not going to
manager, so you can understand how the manager, the problems he or she is is
grappling with. And its going to make you a better employee and managers pick that up
very very quickly. Even in an interview
it can be very, I won't say easily, but it can you can get you can pick up on
interview who has a capacity to casually kind of perceive what the problem is, how
to think through it and basically just make the manager's life easier
because ultimately that's who the manager is going to hire