Review: Engineer Your Own Success: 7 Key Elements to Creating an Extraordinary Engineering Career

Engineer Your Own Success: 7 Key Elements to Creating an Extraordinary Engineering Career, by Anthony Fasano, P.E., is a book that provides excellent career tips and addresses key issues that often prevent engineers from advancing in their profession and reaching their career goals. It's an easy-to-read book that aims to provide basic ideas for career advancement for engineers of all ages, yet powerful enough to make you realize the missing elements that will take your career to the next level.

The 7 key themes that are addressed throughout the book are career goals, credentials, mentoring, networking, communication, organization and leadership. The topics discussed in this book should be common sense to all of us, but can easily be forgotten in the heavily technical field that is engineering. These topics are not in our engineering curriculum, yet are very important in our profession if we want to steer our careers in the direction we want it to go. We as engineers typically get so caught up with number crunching that we often fail to realize that our careers won't advance to the next level if we don't learn and apply these important elements. The key is to notice that it's just as important to apply these elements just as it is to learn them.

In my opinion, the most important section in the book is about setting your career goals. Once you create a list of the things you want to accomplish and set a time frame to each of them, now it's only a matter of figuring out how you will get there. With some hard work and dedication, it won't be long before you achieve your goals. Another section that really caught my attention was the one covering networking. I can't stress enough how important networking is to any career. Not just networking in our engineering field, but networking with all types of people from different industries. The more people you know, the more likely you are to have someone to rely on when you need something, the more likely you will be asked for help which will help build relationships, and the higher possibility you have to bring in new work for your firm.

I had the pleasure to meet Mr. Fasano when he gave a presentation in Miami this year at an ASCE seminar. It was actually great timing that I attended this seminar because it was a point in my life when I faced a fork on the road.  It was a time in my young career where I had to choose to continue being an engineer that sits behind a computer crunching numbers while earning a nice salary, or to advance to the next level and become a manager where the possibilities are virtually endless.

Most likely at some point in your career as an engineer you will be faced with this same choice. From my experience, I can say that you are much more valuable to a company if you are someone that applies these 7 key elements Mr. Fasano touches on in his book. When economies are tough,the number-crunching engineers who don't bring new business to a firm are the first ones to go, and they are also limited to their earning potential as there is only so much you can bill for a project manager/engineer. On the other hand, if you are actively networking and bringing in new clients, have credentials and are a great communicator, you are extremely valuable and will generally not find it difficult to find a job. By the way, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being a number-crunching engineer for your entire career if that's what you enjoy. 

Engineer Your Own Success: 7 Key Elements to Creating an Extraordinary Engineering Career is a book that every engineer should read if they want to advance their career. I promise that if you apply the elements he stresses in the book, you will realize that achieving your career goals will be a real possibility if you put your mind to it and stay focused on the end game (whatever that may be). I have applied most of these elements in my career and I can truly say that they have had a profound impact on getting me where I am today. Don't wait and go ahead and grab a copy of this great book!

Posted by: Rey Villa